The effect of negative emotion processing on spatial navigation: an experimental study using virtual reality

Abstract

Finding one's way in unfamiliar environments is an essential ability. When navigating, people are overwhelmed with an enormous amount of information. However, some information might be more relevant than others. Despite the mounting knowledge about the mechanisms underlying orientational skills, and the notable effects of facial emotions on human behavior, little is known about emotions' effects on spatial navigation. Hereby, this study aimed to explore how exposure to others' negative emotional facial expressions affects wayfinding performances. Moreover, gender differences that characterize both processes were considered. Fifty-five participants (31 females) entered twice in three realistic virtual reality environments: the first time, to encode a route to find an object and then to recall the learned path to reach the same object again. In between the two explorations of the virtual environment, participants were asked to undergo a gender categorization task during which they were exposed to sixty faces showing either neutral, fearful, or angry expressions. Results showed a significant interaction between emotions, time, and gender. In particular, the exposition to fearful faces, but not angry and neutral ones, decreased males' wayfinding performances (i.e., travel times and distance travelled), while females' performances were unaffected. Possible explanations for such gender and emotional dissimilarities are discussed.

Keywords: emotions; faces; fear; spatial navigation; virtual reality.

Figure 1

Images of the office building asset created in unity. The asset was retrieved from the unity asset store (255 Pixel Studios (2018), Jun 21, 2018).

Figure 2

Examples of male and female expressing fearful, angry, and neutral faces extracted from the Radboud Face Database (Langner et al., 2010). The list of stimuli id used extracted from the Rafd are available on OSF: https://osf.io/wzbvy/. See Radboud Faces Database (ru.nl) to have access to the database.

Figure 3

Example of the procedural sequence with footprints. Encoding phases are shown on the left, the categorization task in the middle, and the recalling phases on the right.

Figure 4

Example of the sequence of events in a trial for the categorization task.

Figure 5

Line and violin plots representing the difference in travel times in seconds (after the logarithmic transformation) between single encoding (T1) and recalling (T2) sessions (A) and differential score (T1–T2) (B) as a function of gender and emotional conditions. Lower numbers indicate better performances in graph a, and vice versa in graph b. The light blue line represents female participants, and the orange line represents male participants. Bars represent standard error around the means.

Figure 6

Line and violin plots representing the difference in distance travelled in seconds (after the logarithmic transformation) between single encoding (T1) and recalling (T2) sessions (A) and differential score (T1–T2) (B) as a function of gender and emotional conditions. Lower numbers indicate better performances in graph a, and vice versa in graph b. The light blue line represents female participants, and the orange line represents male participants. Bars represent standard error around the means.