TY  - JOUR
A1  - Diemer, Julia
A1  - Alpers, Georg W.
A1  - Peperkorn, Henrik M.
A1  - Shiban, Youssef
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
T1  - The impact of perception and presence on emotional reactions: a review of research in virtual reality
JF  - Frontiers in Psychology
N2  - Virtual reality (VR) has made its way into mainstream psychological research in the last two decades. This technology, with its unique ability to simulate complex, real situations and contexts, offers researchers unprecedented opportunities to investigate human behavior in well controlled designs in the laboratory. One important application of VR is the investigation of pathological processes in mental disorders, especially anxiety disorders. Research on the processes underlying threat perception, fear, and exposure therapy has shed light on more general aspects of the relation between perception and emotion. Being by its nature virtual, i.e., simulation of reality, VR strongly relies on the adequate selection of specific perceptual cues to activate emotions. Emotional experiences in turn are related to presence, another important concept in VR, which describes the user's sense of being in a VR environment. This paper summarizes current research into perception of fear cues, emotion, and presence, aiming at the identification of the most relevant aspects of emotional experience in VR and their mutual relations. A special focus lies on a series of recent experiments designed to test the relative contribution of perception and conceptual information on fear in VR. This strand of research capitalizes on the dissociation between perception (bottom up input) and conceptual information (top-down input) that is possible in VR. Further, we review the factors that have so far been recognized to influence presence, with emotions (e.g., fear) being the most relevant in the context of clinical psychology. Recent research has highlighted the mutual influence of presence and fear in VR, but has also traced the limits of our current understanding of this relationship. In this paper, the crucial role of perception on eliciting emotional reactions is highlighted, and the role of arousal as a basic dimension of emotional experience is discussed. An interoceptive attribution model of presence is suggested as a first step toward an integrative framework for emotion research in VR. Gaps in the current literature and future directions are outlined.
KW  - exposure therapy
KW  - flight phobics
KW  - environments
KW  - virtual reality
KW  - anxiety
KW  - presence
KW  - emotion
KW  - fear
KW  - perception
KW  - anxiety disorders
KW  - presence questionnaire
KW  - public speaking
KW  - spider phobia
KW  - social phobia
KW  - immersion
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-144200
VL  - 6
IS  - 26
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hovestadt, Thomas
A1  - Poethke, Hans J.
A1  - Messner, Stefan
T1  - Variability in dispersal distances generates typical successional patterns: a simple simulation model
N2  - More recently, it became clear that conclusions drawn from traditional ecological theory may be altered substantially if the spatial dimension of species interactions is considered explicitly. Regardless of the details of these models, spatially explicit simulations of ecological processes have nearly universally shown that spatial or spatio-temporal patterns in species distributions can emerge even from homogeneous starting conditions; limited dispersal is one of the key factors responsible for the development of such aggregated and patchy distributions (cf., Pacala 1986, Holmes et al. 1994, Molofsky 1994, Tilman 1994, Bascompte and Sole 1995, 1997, 1998, Jeltsch et al. 1999). In line with these ideas, we wish to draw attention to the fact that in heterogeneous landscapes differences in characteristic dispersal distances between species are a sufficient precondition for the emergence of a successional pattern. We will use a simple, spatially explicit simulation program to demonstrate the validity of this statement. We will also show that the speed of the successional progress depends on scale and heterogeneity in the distribution of suitable habitat.
KW  - community
KW  - competition
KW  - environments
KW  - habitats
KW  - life-history
Y1  - 2000
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-48178
ER  -