Pain Experience in Social VR: The Competing Effect on Objective Pain Tolerance and Subjective Pain Perception
Angel Hsing‐Chi Hwang, Yilu Sun, Neta Tamir, Andrea Stevenson Won · 2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW) · 2020
The distractive qualities of virtual reality are known to decrease pain. As technology develops, new opportunities to augment VR's distractive capacities are arising. For example, social interaction in virtual reality can increase distraction and possibly also provide social support. Below, we describe a pilot study designed to investigate whether interacting with an attachment Figure versus interacting with a stranger in the virtual world would yield any difference on participants' pain ratings and pain threshold in an experimental pain task. We designed a within-group single-factor experiment with three conditions; being alone in VR, interacting with an attachment Figure in VR, and interacting with a stranger in VR. We aimed to investigate the effect on participants of distinct attachment styles in close relationships. In preliminary findings, we observed trends for the highest tolerance for mild induced pain when participants interacted with their loved ones. Besides, participants reported the most severe perceived pain when interacting with strangers in VR. We discuss implications for future work.