Designing Training Scenarios for Stressful Spaceflight Emergency Procedures

Graduated stress exposure aims to alleviate the negative effects of stress on task performance during high-stress conditions. Skills are practiced in increasing stress conditions that approximate the operational environment. Practice continues until stress resilience and task proficiency are achieved. The use of virtual reality (VR) for inducing a stress response has increased in popularity in recent years. The ability to simulate operational tasks could create training based on graduated stress exposure. However, more research is needed to verify that stress levels can be effectively manipulated in the virtual environment during training, and that the VR training task accurately replicates the existing task procedure. The objective of this study was to investigate the creation of different VR stressor levels from existing emergency spaceflight procedures and validate three distinguishable stressor levels (i.e., low, medium, high). Experts in spaceflight procedures and the human stress response helped design a VR spaceflight environment and emergency fire task procedure. A within-subject experiment was conducted using the three stressor levels. Sixty-one healthy participants completed three trials in VR to locate and extinguish a fire on the International Space Station (VR-ISS). Self-assessment was implemented for each stressor level; NASA Task load index, Post Task Stress Reaction scale, Free stress scale, Positive and Negative Affect Scale, and Short Stress State Questionnaire were used for assessment. The results suggest that the stressors can induce different, distinguishable, levels of stress in trainees for use in graduated stress exposure training.