scholarly journals Preprint: Embodiment of approach-avoidance behavior

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas B Eder ◽  
Anand Krishna ◽  
Albrecht Sebald ◽  
Wilfried Kunde
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Avoidance Behavior ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Avoidance Motivation ◽  
Aversive Stimuli ◽  
Approach Avoidance

Previous studies showed that humans can flexibly reconfigure manual reactions to motivational stimuli in order to produce compatible changes in visual environments (i.e., approach appetitive and avoid aversive stimuli). Using a virtual reality headset, we examined whether analogous flexibility is observed with whole-body movements in forward and backward directions that produced (non-)corresponding visual movements in a virtual environment. Two experiments showed that forward movements were initiated faster in response to a (pleasant) flower and backward movements in response to an (unpleasant) spider, even when the movements resulted in reverse visual motions towards the spider and away from the flower. In contrast, visual motions were more important when these motions were controlled manually and after strategic preparation of producing body steps. Overall, results suggest that there is a highly overlearned connection between locomotion and approach/avoidance that is difficult to override. Implications in regard to the embodiment of approach-avoidance motivation are discussed.

scholarly journals Assessing Automatic Approach-Avoidance Behavior in an Immersive Virtual Environment

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliane Degner ◽  
Lea Steep ◽  
Susanne Schmidt ◽  
Frank Steinicke
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Avoidance Behavior ◽  
Body Movement ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Approach And Avoidance ◽  
Stimulus Response ◽  
Immersive Virtual Environment ◽  
Behavioral Tendencies ◽  
Approach Avoidance ◽  
And Behavior

The use of virtual reality (VR) promises enormous potential for studying human behavior. While approach and avoidance tendencies have been explored in various areas of basic and applied psychology, such as attitude and emotion research, basic learning psychology, and behavior therapy, they have rarely been studied in VR. One major focus of this research is to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying automatic behavioral tendencies towards and away from positively or negatively evaluated stimuli. We implemented a whole-body movement stimulus-response compatibility task to explore approach-avoidance behavior in an immersive virtual environment. We chose attitudinal stimuli—spiders and butterflies—on which people widely agree in their general evaluations (in that people evaluate spiders negatively and butterflies positively), while there is still substantial inter-individual variance (i. e., the intensity in which people dislike spiders or like butterflies). We implemented two parallel approach-avoidance tasks, one in VR, one desktop-based. Both tasks revealed the expected compatibility effects that were positively intercorrelated. Interestingly, however, the compatibility effect in the VR measure was unrelated to participants’ self-reported fear of spiders and stimulus evaluations. These results raise important implications about the usage of VR to study automatic behavioral tendencies.

scholarly journals Virtual Reality and Assistive Technologies: A Survey

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-57
Author(s):  
Shamima Yasmin
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
Sensory Substitution ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Rehabilitation Therapy ◽  
Extensive Survey ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Mental Exercise

This paper conducts an extensive survey on existing Virtual Reality (VR)-based rehabilitation approaches in the context of different types of impairments: mobility, cognitive, and visual. Some VR-based assistive technologies involve repetitions of body movements, some require persistent mental exercise, while some work as sensory substitution systems. A multi-modal VR-based environment can incorporate a number of senses, (i.e., visual, auditory, or haptic) into the system and can be an immense source of motivation and engagement in comparison with traditional rehabilitation therapy. This survey categorizes virtual environments on the basis of different available modalities. Each category is again subcategorized by the types of impairments while introducing available devices and interfaces. Before concluding the survey, the paper also briefly focuses on some issues with existing VR-based approaches that need to be optimized to exploit the utmost benefit of virtual environment-based rehabilitation systems .

scholarly journals Augmented rotations in virtual reality for users with a reduced range of head movement

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 205566831984130
Author(s):  
Nahal Norouzi ◽  
Luke Bölling ◽  
Gerd Bruder ◽  
Greg Welch
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
User Interfaces ◽  
Head Movement ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Eye Tracker ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Head Tracker ◽  
Head Rotations

Introduction: A large body of research in the field of virtual reality is focused on making user interfaces more natural and intuitive by leveraging natural body movements to explore a virtual environment. For example, head-tracked user interfaces allow users to naturally look around a virtual space by moving their head. However, such approaches may not be appropriate for users with temporary or permanent limitations of their head movement. Methods: In this paper, we present techniques that allow these users to get virtual benefits from a reduced range of physical movements. Specifically, we describe two techniques that augment virtual rotations relative to physical movement thresholds. Results: We describe how each of the two techniques can be implemented with either a head tracker or an eye tracker, e.g. in cases when no physical head rotations are possible. Conclusions: We discuss their differences and limitations and we provide guidelines for the practical use of such augmented user interfaces.

Both distance change and movement goal affect whole-body approach-avoidance behavior.

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-172
Author(s):  
Daniëlle Bouman ◽  
John F. Stins ◽  
Peter J. Beek
Keyword(s):  
Avoidance Behavior ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Approach Avoidance ◽  
Distance Change

scholarly journals Validation of New Methods of Using Simulated Whole-Body Movements as Implicit Indicators of Sound and Odor Preferences

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donato Cereghetti ◽  
Pauline Faye ◽  
Laetitia Gros ◽  
Lucas Mahé ◽  
Emmanuelle Diaz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Stimulus ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Hedonic Value ◽  
Visual Approach ◽  
Approach Avoidance ◽  
Odor Preferences ◽  
Positive Stimuli ◽  
Avoidance Reactions

Would you get close to a stinky perfume bottle or to a loudspeaker producing noise? In this paper, we present two procedures that allowed us to assess the ability of auditory and olfactory cues to elicit automatic approach/avoidance reactions toward their sources. The procedures resulted from an adaptation of the Visual Approach/Avoidance by the Self Task (VAAST; Rougier et al., 2018), a task having the peculiarity of simulating approach/avoidance reactions by using visual feedback coming from the whole-body movements. In the auditory VAAST (Experiment 1), participants were instructed to move forward or backward from a loudspeaker that produced spoken words differentiated by their level of distortion and thus by their hedonic value. In the olfactory VAAST (Experiment 2), participants were asked to move forward or backward from a perfume bottle that delivered pleasant and unpleasant odors. We expected, consistent with the approach/avoidance compatibility effect, shorter latencies for approaching positive stimuli and avoiding negative stimuli. In both experiments, we found an effect of the quality of the emotional stimulus on forward actions of participants, with undistorted words and pleasant odors inducing faster forward movements compared with that for distorted words and unpleasant odors. Notably, our results further suggest that the VAAST can successfully be used with implicit instructions, i.e., without requiring participants to explicitly process the valence of the emotional stimulus (in Experiment 1) or even the emotional stimulus itself (in Experiment 2). The sensitivity of our procedures is analyzed and its potential in cross-modal and (contextualized) consumer research discussed.

Approach-avoidance motivation moderates emotion regulation and affects goal attainment

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Kozonis ◽  
Elliot Berkman ◽  
Thery Prok ◽  
Matthew Lieberman ◽  
Shelly Gable
Keyword(s):  
Emotion Regulation ◽  
Goal Attainment ◽  
Avoidance Motivation ◽  
Approach Avoidance
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