Effects of Graphical Styles on Emotional States for VR-Supported Psychotherapy

Several medical domains investigated Virtual Reality (VR) as a supporting technology for teaching and training of novices and experts. In psychotherapy, VR has been identified also as a promising treatment instrument. This paper presents a study on VR assisted psychotherapy, evaluating the effects of graphical styles on emotional states of N=74 subjects. Assessed data has been used to first statistically check, if the presented VR-scenes can create a positive emotional effect, here relaxation. In addition, we examined the difference of changes of the emotional state with respect to two different graphical styles, both being typical for state-of-the-art video games. One of these styles is supposed to render highly realistic scenes at high computational costs. The second style has been deliberately chosen, to present an alternative requiring low performance devices such as mobile phones on wireless VR devices. As a third research target, we surveyed the difference of measured effects with respect to technical background knowledge of subjects. The study has been set up as a pre-study acquiring healthy students as subjects instead of patients suffering from psychological disorders.