A virtual reality paradigm simulating blood donation serves as a platform to test interventions to promote donation.

Effective interventions that support blood donor retention are needed. Yet, integrating an intervention into the time-pressed and operationally sensitive context of a blood donation center requires justification for disruptions to an optimized process. This research provides evidence that virtual reality (VR) paradigms can serve as a research environment in which interventions can be tested prior to being delivered in blood donation centers. Study 1 (N = 48) demonstrated that 360°-video VR blood donation environments elicit a similar profile of emotional experience to a live donor center. Presence and immersion were high, and cybersickness symptoms low. Study 2 (N = 134) was an experiment deploying the 360°-video VR environments to test the impact of an intervention on emotional experience and intentions to donate. Participants in the intervention condition who engaged in a suite of tasks drawn from the process model of emotion regulation (including attentional deployment, positive reappraisal, and response modulation) reported more positive emotion than participants in a control condition, which in turn increased intentions to donate blood. By showing the promise for benefitting donor experience via a relatively low-cost and low-resource methodology, this research supports the use of VR paradigms to trial interventions prior to deployment in operationally-context field settings.

Evidence of the unidimensional structure of mind perception.

The last decade has witnessed intense interest in how people perceive the minds of other entities (humans, non-human animals, and non-living objects and forces) and how this perception impacts behavior. Despite the attention paid to the topic, the psychological structure of mind perception-that is, the underlying properties that account for variance across judgements of entities-is not clear and extant reports conflict in terms of how to understand the structure. In the present research, we evaluated the psychological structure of mind perception by having participants evaluate a wide array of human, non-human animal, and non-animal entities. Using an entirely within-participants design, varied measurement approaches, and data-driven analyses, four studies demonstrated that mind perception is best conceptualized along a single dimension.