Can you see an emotion?: Emotional evaluation of contextless visual stimuli in Virtual Reality

• DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/9jguh_v3
• Publication Date: 2025-03-03T22:35:18Z
• Authors: Andres Pinilla; Jaime Garcia; William Raffe; Jan-Niklas Voigt-...; Sebastian Möller

Previous studies support the existence of objective emotional visual cues. Forinstance, red and blue are usually associated with high and low arousal, respectively. A similar phenomenon has been observed with other colors, as well as textures, shapes, and motion patterns. Yet, it is not clear to which extent this phenomenon can be extrapolated to Virtual Reality (VR) stimuli. Therefore, this manuscript presents an experiment where five virtual environments were evaluated by 21 participants in terms of valence and arousal. The design of the virtual environments was informed by evidence found in previous studies. Each environment represents one of the four quadrants of the Circumplex Model of Affect, plus a neutral environment. The results suggest that the emotions associated with the virtual environments are consistent with the evidence used to inform the designprocess. Individual differences across participants do not seem to influence the evaluation of the visual cues.