Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) use emotion based based therapies to alleviate anxiety, stress, and depression and for gaming involves excitement and enjoyment. Key to these experiences are the feeling of being there (spatial presence) and being with others (Social Presence) within VR.This thesis addresses: What are people’s lived experiences of emotion, especially gratitude, and presence within VR environments? This thesis views people as inhabiting a world experienced as meaningful and interpreted as they live it. Secondarily, the thesis relates these experiences to theories of how emotion, especially gratitude, and presence and how may be explained by the enactive approach, including an enactive approach to presence (EAP) developed in this thesis. There is little research clarifying how emotion related to presence in virtual environments and none specific to gratitude. This triggered the primary research question.
The enactive approach adopts a unified approach between mind, body and environment and emphasises that dynamic interactions between these are purposeful such that presence and emotion emerge as forms of meaning or sense-making. Qualitative Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is used to examine this lived experience. Gratitude was induced in a helping scenario. IPA captured the experience of unfolding emotional episodes and presence over time. Questionnaires provide additional evidence easing comparison with quantitative studies. The findings were recast via an enactive lens and compared with existing research relating emotion to presence.
Eight themes were identified: purpose and intentionality; curiosity, exploration and evaluation; orientation of emotion: its nature and intentionality; unfolding presence episodes; weirdness and dissonance; role of the avatar; gratitude: other,benefit, help, and culture and foreknowledge. The first three are closely linked. Gratitude boosted positive feelings towards others and increased social presence even where the helping avatar’s humanity was doubted. For spatial presence, emotion needed to be orientated towards the physical environment for increased spatial presence or social interactions for increased social presence. A novel view of social presence dependent upon dynamic coupling, including dissonant connectedness of emotions, which may enhance or reduce social presence.
The thesis highlights first the strength of examining presence from the psychological perspective. Psychologists and VR designers need to consider not only actions, emotion as independent storylines but also the role of intentionality both within the virtual environment but also external to it. It highlights considering the interactions as a whole experience and consideration in terms of the coupling between individuals and environment in general and how designers should design for these. Such an approach paves the way for an improved therapeutic use of gratitude and empathetic VR to improve mental wellbeing, stimulate VR collaboration, and further social cognition research.
| Date of Award | Jul 2020 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Ian Dunwell (Supervisor), Sara de Freitas (Supervisor), Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland (Supervisor) & Pam Kato (Supervisor) |