Abstract
Stress reactivity involves a physiological response to a stressful task, as a biological mechanism related to mental and physical health outcomes. Traditional stressors evoke social evaluative threat, which is fear of judgment and a threat to social status, typically via public speaking tasks. To be well-suited for virtual reality, however, a novel approach is necessary in the design of new stress tasks. We hypothesized that a virtual reality stress task involving social evaluative threat through a dance competition in front of an audience, elicits a stress response, measured by autonomic nervous system, cortisol, and testosterone reactivity. Participants (nā=ā18) showed autonomic nervous system reactivity in terms of increased heart rate and decreased respiratory sinus arrhythmia, indicating a stress response. Levels of cortisol increased in response to the dance competition, especially within responders, whereas testosterone levels did not change significantly over time. A virtual reality dance competition involving physical social evaluative threat elicits a stress response.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Fraser, R., Ingram, M.C., Anderson, N.H., Morrison, C., Davies, E., Connell, J.M.: Cortisol effects on body mass, blood pressure, and cholesterol in the general population. Hypertension 33, 1364ā1368 (1999)
Staufenbiel, S.M., Penninx, B.W., Spijker, A.T., Elzinga, B.M., van Rossum, E.F.: Hair cortisol, stress exposure, and mental health in humans: a systematic review. Psychoneuroendocrinology 38, 1220ā1235 (2013)
Cohen, S., Hamrick, N., Rodriguez, M.S., Feldman, P.J., Rabin, B.S., Manuck, S.B.: The stability of and intercorrelations among cardiovascular, immune, endocrine, and psychological reactivity. Ann. Behav. Med. 22, 171ā179 (2000)
Hertzman, C.: The biological embedding of early experience and its effects on health in adulthood. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 896, 85ā95 (1999)
Bobadilla, L., Asberg, K., Johnson, M., Shirtcliff, E.A.: Experiences in the military may impact dual-axis neuroendocrine processes in veterans. Dev. Psychobiol. 57, 719ā730 (2015)
Shirtcliff, E.A., Peres, J.C., Dismukes, A.R., Lee, Y., Phan, J.M.: Hormones: commentary. Riding the physiological roller coaster: adaptive significance of cortisol stress reactivity to social contexts. J. Pers. Disord. 28, 40ā51 (2014)
Del Giudice, M., Ellis, B.J., Shirtcliff, E.A.: The adaptive calibration model of stress responsivity. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 35, 1562ā1592 (2011)
White, S.F., Lee, Y., Phan, J.M., Moody, S.N., Shirtcliff, E.A.: Putting the flight in āfight-or-flightā: testosterone reactivity to skydiving is modulated by autonomic activation. Biol. Psychol. 143, 93ā102 (2019)
Kirschbaum, C., Pirke, K.-M., Hellhammer, D.H.: The ātrier social stress testāāa tool for investigating psychobiological stress responses in a laboratory setting. Neuropsychobiology 28, 76ā81 (1993)
Dickerson, S.S., Kemeny, M.E.: Acute stressors and cortisol responses: a theoretical integration and synthesis of laboratory research. Psychol. Bull. 130, 355ā391 (2004)
Shiban, Y., Diemer, J., Brandl, S., Zack, R., MĆ¼hlberger, A., WĆ¼st, S.: Trier social stress test in vivo and in virtual reality: dissociation of response domains. Int. J. Psychophysiol. 110, 47ā55 (2016)
Helminen, E.C., Morton, M.L., Wang, Q., Felver, J.C.: A meta-analysis of cortisol reactivity to the trier social stress test in virtual environments. Psychoneuroendocrinology 110, 104437 (2019)
Westenberg, P.M., Bokhorst, C.L., Miers, A.C., Sumter, S.R., Kallen, V.L., van Pelt, J., Blote, A.W.: A prepared speech in front of a pre-recorded audience: subjective, physiological, and neuroendocrine responses to the leiden public speaking task. Biol. Psychol. 82, 116ā124 (2009)
Blote, A.W., Miers, A.C., Heyne, D.A., Clark, D.M., Westenberg, P.M.: The relation between social anxiety and audience perception: examining Clark and Wellsā (1995) model among adolescents. Behav. Cogn. Psychother. 42, 555ā567 (2014)
Gunnar, M.R., Talge, N.M., Herrera, A.: Stressor paradigms in developmental studies: what does and does not work to produce mean increases in salivary cortisol. Psychoneuroendocrinology 34, 953ā967 (2009)
Rohleder, N., Beulen, S.E., Chen, E., Wolf, J.M., Kirschbaum, C.: Stress on the dance floor: the cortisol stress response to social-evaluative threat in competitive ballroom dancers. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 33, 69ā84 (2007)
Dedovic, K., Rexroth, M., Wolff, E., Duchesne, A., Scherling, C., Beaudry, T., Lue, S.D., Lord, C., Engert, V., Pruessner, J.C.: Neural correlates of processing stressful information: an event-related fMRI study. Brain Res. 1293, 49ā60 (2009)
Finseth, T., Barnett, N., Shirtcliff, E.A., Dorneich, M.C., Keren, N.: Stress inducing demands in virtual environments. Proc. Hum. Factors Ergon. Soc. Ann. Meet. 62, 2066ā2070 (2018)
Groer, M., Murphy, R., Bunnell, W., Salomon, K., Van Eepoel, J., Rankin, B., White, K., Bykowski, C.: Salivary measures of stress and immunity in police officers engaged in simulated critical incident scenarios. J. Occup. Med. 52, 595ā602 (2010)
Hellhammer, D.H., Buchtal, J., Gutberlet, I., Kirschbaum, C.: Social hierarchy and adrenocortical stress reactivity in men. Psychoneuroendocrinology 22, 643ā650 (1997)
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation REU site SPIRE-EIT under IIS-1757900 (PIās Eliot Winer and Stephen Gilbert). Special thanks to SPIT lab members, VRAC infrastructure, Vijay Kiran Kalivarapu and Tor Finseth.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
Ā© 2021 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
van Dammen, L., Barnett, N., Conrady, R., Wright, L., Thymes, B., Shirtcliff, E.A. (2021). Evoking Stress Reactivity in a Virtual Dance Competition. In: Cassenti, D., Scataglini, S., Rajulu, S., Wright, J. (eds) Advances in Simulation and Digital Human Modeling. AHFE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1206. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51064-0_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51064-0_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-51063-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-51064-0
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)