The Effect of Exposure to Fear-Related Body Odorants on Anxiety and Interpersonal Trust Toward a Virtual Character.

A growing body of literature documents how exposure to another person's fear-related body odorants can increase one's own anxiety and interfere with processing of social information, such as facial expression and impression formation. Building on these results, we aimed to 1) test the hypothesis that exposure to fear-related odorant would affect impression formation through fear contagion and 2) verify whether these effects can be observed in an ecologically valid (i.e., virtual) environment. We proposed that exposure to fear-related odorant would cause receivers to feel more anxious, which in turn would lead them to report less trust toward an unknown virtual character. This study had 2 distinct phases. First, we collected perspiration odorants from the armpits of 12 male senders (i.e., the source of the odorant) during the viewing of either fear or joy inducing film clips. In the second phase, 53 women receivers were exposed to either a fear, joy, or neutral odorant (i.e., between-subjects design) by breathing through a gauze attached to a disposable respirator mask while immersed in a virtual bar. As expected, receivers exposed to fear odorants felt significantly more stressed. Mediation analysis also revealed an indirect effect of exposure on trust through anxiety. More specifically, the more anxious the receiver felt, the less she trusted the virtual character. Our results show for the first time that the impact of exposure to fear-related body odorants on negative interpersonal impression formation is mediated by the anxiety induced in the receiver.

Moving from virtual reality exposure-based therapy to augmented reality exposure-based therapy: a review.

This paper reviews the move from virtual reality exposure-based therapy to augmented reality exposure-based therapy (ARET). Unlike virtual reality (VR), which entails a complete virtual environment (VE), augmented reality (AR) limits itself to producing certain virtual elements to then merge them into the view of the physical world. Although, the general public may only have become aware of AR in the last few years, AR type applications have been around since beginning of the twentieth century. Since, then, technological developments have enabled an ever increasing level of seamless integration of virtual and physical elements into one view. Like VR, AR allows the exposure to stimuli which, due to various reasons, may not be suitable for real-life scenarios. As such, AR has proven itself to be a medium through which individuals suffering from specific phobia can be exposed "safely" to the object(s) of their fear, without the costs associated with programing complete VEs. Thus, ARET can offer an efficacious alternative to some less advantageous exposure-based therapies. Above and beyond presenting what has been accomplished in ARET, this paper covers some less well-known aspects of the history of AR, raises some ARET related issues, and proposes potential avenues to be followed. These include the type of measures to be used to qualify the user's experience in an augmented reality environment, the exclusion of certain AR-type functionalities from the definition of AR, as well as the potential use of ARET to treat non-small animal phobias, such as social phobia.

Selection of key stressors to develop virtual environments for practicing stress management skills with military personnel prior to deployment.

Virtual environments (VEs) are presently being used to treat military personnel suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In an attempt to reduce the risk of PTSD, VEs may also be useful for stress management training (SMT) to practice skills under stress, but such use necessitates the development of relevant stress-inducing scenarios and storyboards. This article describes the procedures followed to select which VEs could be built for the Canadian Forces. A review and analysis of the available literature and of data collected postdeployment from 1,319 respondents on the frequency of stressors and their association with psychological injuries were pulled together to propose eight potential virtual stressors that can be used to practice SMT: seeing dead bodies or uncovering human remains; knowing someone being seriously injured or killed; receiving artillery fire; being unable to help ill or wounded civilians because of the rules of engagement; seeing destroyed homes and villages; clearing and searching homes, caves, or bunkers; receiving small-arms fire; and participating in demining operations. Information reported in this article could also be useful to document traumatic stressors experienced in theater of operations and their potential impact on psychological injuries.