Inducing Anxiety through Video Material

For professionals in various domains, training based on Virtual Reality can be an interesting method to improve their emotion regulation skills. However, for such a training system to be effective, it is essential to trigger the desired emotional state in the trainee. Hence, an important question is to what extent virtual stimuli have the ability to induce an emotional stress response. This paper addresses this question by studying the impact of anxiety-inducing video material on skin conductance, heart rate and subjective experience of participants that watch the videos. The results indicate that the scary videos significantly increased skin conductance and subjective response, while no significant effect on heart rate was found. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.