Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Apr 11, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: May 2, 2025 - Jun 27, 2025
Date Accepted: Oct 8, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Effects of semantically irrelevant virtual reality experience on memory and emotion after watching a traumatic event
ABSTRACT
Background:
First responders play crucial roles for protecting citizens and communities from various hazards. Due to the high-stress nature of their work, first responders suffer significant mental health issues. Existing mental health interventions, albeit their benefits, do not target cognitive processing of traumatic events such as memory and emotion.
Objective:
As a novel attempt using immersive virtual reality, the current work aims to examine effects of a semantically irrelevant virtual reality (SIVR) content to intervene in the retrieval of an adverse event memory and associated emotion.
Methods:
A total of 107 participants were recruited in the experiment and randomly assigned to one of three groups: Control Group, Comparison Group, and Intervention Group. In Stage-1, participants in all groups watched a short video of a house fire. In Stage-2, Control Group stayed seated without doing anything. Comparison Group read a text paragraph about Egyptian Ocean, as semantically irrelevant follow-up information. Intervention Group watched a 360° VR video of Egyptian Ocean. Positive And Negative Affect Schedule survey was administered each after the two stages. In Stage-3, the memory accuracy of the house fire video was assessed using a forced recognition test of 15 pairs of a true image and a fake image, generated by AI software.
Results:
One-way ANOVA revealed no difference of the memory accuracy between three groups. However, repeated measures ANOVA found that the SIVR experience significantly boosted positive emotion of Intervention Group participants and reduced negative feelings of participants in all groups.
Conclusions:
Our findings suggest that SIVR serves as a quick and affordable way to address psychological reaction after watching a traumatic event. Future research is required to generate the memory suppression effect of the SIVR content.
Citation
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Copyright
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