Evaluating the Effect of the Color-Word Stroop Test and VR as a Psychological Stressor
Authors: 
Arturo Morales Tellez, María Concepción Valdez Gastelum, 
Luis A. Castro, 
Monica TentoriAuthors Info & Claims
Pages 93 - 97
Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) makes use of psychological stressors to enable users to feel immersed in different domains. Although stressor tests, like the Color-Word Stroop Test (CWST), have been shown to be valid and reliable, there are limited deployments of such stressors that exhibit appropriate immersion and user experience in VR. In this paper, we present the development and evaluation of two VR simulators of the CWST. We conducted a between-subjects study with 27 participants who completed the conventional CWST, a VR-only simulator of the CWST, and a gamified VR simulator of the CWST. We measured and conducted a statistical analysis of participants’ CWST scores, perceived stress, immersion, user experience, playability, and heart rate. Our results show that there are no significant differences in using the two CWST simulators of the VR. We found that users’ heart rate is significantly higher when using the VR simulators than the conventional CWST and that the VR game simulator significantly shows a higher score in immersion than the VR-only simulator. However, users’ perceived stress was significantly less when using the VR game simulator. Finally, we reflect on design insights for stressors tests in VR and discuss directions for future work.
References
[1]
Ane Alberdi, Asier Aztiria, and Adrian Basarab. 2016. Towards an automatic early stress recognition system for office environments based on multimodal measurements: A review. Journal of biomedical informatics 59 (2016), 49–75.
[2]
Doug A Bowman and Ryan P McMahan. 2007. Virtual reality: how much immersion is enough?Computer 40, 7 (2007), 36–43.
[3]
Daniel W Carruth. 2017. Virtual reality for education and workforce training. In 2017 15th International Conference on Emerging eLearning Technologies and Applications (ICETA). IEEE, 1–6.
[4]
Sally S Dickerson and Margaret E Kemeny. 2004. Acute stressors and cortisol responses: a theoretical integration and synthesis of laboratory research.Psychological bulletin 130, 3 (2004), 355.
[5]
M.A. Fallon, M.M.E. Riem, L.E. Kunst, W.J. Kop, and N. Kupper. 2021. Multi-modal responses to the Virtual Reality Trier Social Stress Test: A comparison with standard interpersonal and control conditions. International Journal of Psychophysiology 161 (mar 2021), 27–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2021.01.010
[6]
CJ Golden. 1994. Stroop. Test de colores y palabras. Madrid: Tea Ediciones (1994).
[7]
Stefan Gradl, Markus Wirth, Nico Mächtlinger, Romina Poguntke, Andrea Wonner, Nicolas Rohleder, and Bjoern M. Eskofier. 2019. The Stroop Room: A Virtual Reality-Enhanced Stroop Test. In 25th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359996.3364247
[8]
Stefan Gradl, Markus Wirth, Robert Richer, Nicolas Rohleder, and Bjoern M Eskofier. 2019. An overview of the feasibility of permanent, real-time, unobtrusive stress measurement with current wearables. In Proceedings of the 13th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare. 360–365.
[9]
Lynsey Gregg and Nicholas Tarrier. 2007. Virtual reality in mental health. Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology 42, 5 (2007), 343–354.
[10]
Mylène Henry, Christian C. Joyal, and Pierre Nolin. 2012. Development and initial assessment of a new paradigm for assessing cognitive and motor inhibition: The bimodal virtual-reality Stroop. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 210, 2 (sep 2012), 125–131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneumeth.2012.07.025
[11]
Wijnand IJsselsteijn, Wouter Van Den Hoogen, Christoph Klimmt, Yvonne De Kort, Craig Lindley, Klaus Mathiak, Karolien Poels, Niklas Ravaja, Marko Turpeinen, and Peter Vorderer. 2008. Measuring the experience of digital game enjoyment. In Proceedings of measuring behavior, Vol. 2008. Noldus Maastricht, the Netherlands, 88–89.
[12]
Charlene Jennett, Anna L Cox, Paul Cairns, Samira Dhoparee, Andrew Epps, Tim Tijs, and Alison Walton. 2008. Measuring and defining the experience of immersion in games. International journal of human-computer studies 66, 9 (2008), 641–661.
[13]
Hyewon Kim, Dong Jun Kim, Seonwoo Kim, Won Ho Chung, Kyung-Ah Park, James D. K. Kim, Dowan Kim, Min Ji Kim, Kiwon Kim, and Hong Jin Jeon. 2021. Effect of Virtual Reality on Stress Reduction and Change of Physiological Parameters Including Heart Rate Variability in People With High Stress: An Open Randomized Crossover Trial. Frontiers in Psychiatry 12 (aug 2021). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.614539
[14]
Hye-Geum Kim, Eun-Jin Cheon, Dai-Seg Bai, Young Hwan Lee, and Bon-Hoon Koo. 2018. Stress and heart rate variability: A meta-analysis and review of the literature. Psychiatry investigation 15, 3 (2018), 235.
[15]
Clemens Kirschbaum, Karl-Martin Pirke, and Dirk H Hellhammer. 1993. The ‘Trier Social Stress Test’–a tool for investigating psychobiological stress responses in a laboratory setting. Neuropsychobiology 28, 1-2 (1993), 76–81.
[16]
Michael Kotlyar, Christopher Donahue, Paul Thuras, Matt G. Kushner, Natalie O’Gorman, Erin A Smith, and David E. Adson. 2008. Physiological response to a speech stressor presented in a virtual reality environment. Psychophysiology 45, 6 (nov 2008), 1034–1037. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.2008.00690.x
[17]
Marieke AG Martens, Angus Antley, Daniel Freeman, Mel Slater, Paul J Harrison, and Elizabeth M Tunbridge. 2019. It feels real: physiological responses to a stressful virtual reality environment and its impact on working memory. Journal of Psychopharmacology 33, 10 (oct 2019), 1264–1273. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881119860156
[18]
Elvira Mendoza and Gloria Carballo. 1998. Acoustic analysis of induced vocal stressby means of cognitive workload tasks. Journal of Voice 12, 3 (1998), 263–273.
[19]
Arturo Morales Téllez, Monica E Tentori, and Luis A Castro. 2021. Stress management training in athletes: Design considerations for VR biofeedback systems. In 8th Mexican Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. 1–3.
[20]
Max M North, Sarah M North, and Joseph R Coble. 1998. Virtual reality therapy: an effective treatment for the fear of public speaking. International Journal of Virtual Reality 3, 3 (1998), 1–6.
[21]
Luke Parkitny and James McAuley. 2010. The depression anxiety stress scale (DASS). Journal of physiotherapy 56, 3 (2010), 204.
[22]
Thomas D. Parsons and Christopher G. Courtney. 2018. Interactions Between Threat and Executive Control in a Virtual Reality Stroop Task. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 9, 1 (jan 2018), 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2016.2569086
[23]
Maria Rauschenberger, Martin Schrepp, Manuel Pérez Cota, Siegfried Olschner, and Jörg Thomaschewski. 2013. Efficient measurement of the user experience of interactive products. How to use the user experience questionnaire (UEQ). Example: Spanish language version. (2013).
[24]
Albert A. Rizzo, Todd Bowerly, J. Galen Buckwalter, Dean Klimchuk, Roman Mitura, and Thomas D. Parsons. 2009. A Virtual Reality Scenario for All Seasons: The Virtual Classroom. CNS Spectrums 11, 1 (oct 2009), 35–44. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1092852900024196
[25]
Federica Scarpina and Sofia Tagini. 2017. The stroop color and word test. Frontiers in psychology 8 (2017), 557.
[26]
Aaron Smith. 1967. The serial sevens subtraction test. Archives of Neurology 17, 1 (1967), 78–80.
[27]
Maike Stoeve, Markus Wirth, Rosanna Farlock, André Antunovic, Victoria Müller, and Bjoern M. Eskofier. 2022. Eye Tracking-Based Stress Classification of Athletes in Virtual Reality. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques 5, 2 (may 2022), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3530796
[28]
J Ridley Stroop. 1935. Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions.Journal of experimental psychology 18, 6 (1935), 643.
[29]
Arturo Morales Téllez, Luis A Castro, and Monica Tentori. 2023. Developing and Evaluating a virtual reality videogame using biofeedback for stress management in sports. Interacting with Computers (2023), iwad025.
[30]
Mattias Wallergård, Peter Jönsson, Gerd Johansson, and Björn Karlson. 2011. A Virtual Reality Version of the Trier Social Stress Test: A Pilot Study. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 20, 4 (aug 2011), 325–336. https://doi.org/10.1162/PRES_a_00052
[31]
Sebastian Weiß, Nelly Klassen, and Wilko Heuten. 2021. Effects of Image Realism on the Stress Response in Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3489849.3489885
Index Terms
- Evaluating the Effect of the Color-Word Stroop Test and VR as a Psychological Stressor
Recommendations
Effect of VR technology matureness on VR sickness
AbstractIn this paper relationship of perceived virtual reality (VR) sickness phenomenon with different generations of virtual reality head mounted displays (VR HMD) is presented. Action content type omnidirectional video clip was watched by means of four ...
Same Same but Different: Exploring the Effects of the Stroop Color Word Test in Virtual Reality
Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2019AbstractVirtual reality (VR) is used for different trainings e.g. for pilots, athletes, and surgeons. Dangerous and difficult situations are often focused in such simulations in VR, targeting to learn how to perform well under stress. However, there has ...
VR Grabbers: Ungrounded Haptic Retargeting for Precision Grabbing Tools
UIST '18: Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and TechnologyHaptic feedback in VR is important for realistic simulation in virtual reality. However, recreating the haptic experience for hand tools in VR traditionally requires hardware with precise actuators, adding complexity to the system. We propose Ungrounded ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
October 2023
822 pages
ISBN:9798400702006
DOI:10.1145/3594739
Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Sponsors
In-Cooperation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 08 October 2023
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Poster
- Research
- Refereed limited
Conference
UbiComp/ISWC '23: The 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing
October 8 - 12, 2023
Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 82Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)52
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
Reflects downloads up to 18 Nov 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format