Towards virtual training of emotion regulation

Tibor Bosse, Charlotte Gerritsen, Jeroen de Man, Jan Treur

For professionals in military and law enforcement domains, learning to regulate one's emotions under threatening circumstances is crucial. The STRESS project envisions a virtual reality-based system to enable such professionals to train their emotion regulation skills. To explore the possibilities for such a system, this article describes an experiment performed to investigate the impact of virtual training on participants' experienced emotional responses in threatening situations. A set of 15 participants were asked to rate the subjective emotional intensity of a set of affective pictures at two different time points, separated by 6 h. The participants were divided into three groups: the first group performed a session of virtual training in between, in which they received a choice-reaction task; the second group performed a session of virtual training, in which they had to apply reappraisal strategies; and a control group, that did not have any training session. The results indicate that the reappraisal-based training caused the participants in that group to give significantly lower ratings for the emotional intensity of the negative pictures, whereas the content-based training resulted in significantly higher ratings compared to the group without training. Moreover, a second experiment, performed with the same participants 6 months later, indicated that these effects are fairly persistent over time, and that they transfer to different pictures with similar characteristics.