Thammasat University students interested in technology, virtual reality, gaming, business, economics, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 20 and 21 November Zoom webinar on Judgement and decision-making in the virtual and real worlds.
The event, on Monday, 20 November 2023 and Tuesday, 21 November 2023 starting at 3pm Bangkok time, is organized by Monash Business School, Monash University, Australia.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of virtual reality.
The event webpage explains:
How is human behaviour affected in a virtual world? How are our decisions, our emotions and our approaches to risk swayed by virtual reality (VR) environments?
These fascinating challenges and more will be explored in the fifth annual Monash Business Behavioural Laboratory (MBBL) Symposium.
A free online event, the symposium will span two evenings on 20 and 21 November, hosting an interdisciplinary panel of VR experts, who will probe data insights from virtual environments, use of VR simulators for human judgement research, executive function assessment and elicitation of risk preferences, VR’s role in emotion regulation and decision-making, and VR’s impact in retail.
Decision-making processes in virtual/ digital spaces, especially those influenced by misbeliefs, and dynamics of screen time management will also be explored.
Attendees can expect a thorough examination of judgement and decision-making in VR and beyond, with opportunities for discussion, Q&A sessions, and collaboration.
Students are invited to register for the event at this link:
https://monash.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvc-ysrDsrEt15QkUwcrmH_Q7wlbN3AqlU#/registration
With any questions or for further information, please write to kristian.rotaru@monash.edu
The event will be hosted by Associate Professor Kristian Rotaru, Monash Business Behavioural Laboratory, Monash Business School, a decision scientist working across different business disciplines, including accounting, information systems, finance and operations management.
He also conducts research in cognitive psychology, with a focus on impulsive and compulsive behaviours, emotional regulation and wellbeing.
It will be cohosted by Professor Russell Smyth, Department of Economics and Deputy Dean (Research), Monash Business School.
Among speakers will be Professor Charmine Härtel, Department of Management and Opportunity Tech Lab, Monash Business School; Dr. Paul McIntosh, Virtual & Augmented Reality Services and Opportunity Tech Lab, Monash Business School; Dr. Lars Kooijman, Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia; Dr. Zhongwen Chen, Department of Economics and MonLEE Lab, Monash Business School; Dr Benjamin Tag, Embodied Visualisation Group, Faculty of IT, Monash University; Dr. Adam Roberts, Future Resilient Systems program, Singapore-ETH Centre; Dr. Anne Odile Pesche, Department of Management, Aarhus University, Denmark; and Associate Professor Xiaojian Zhao, Department of Economics and MonLEE Lab, Monash Business School.
As one explanation posted online notes:
The Importance of Emotion Regulation and how Virtual Reality Can Improve it
Virtual reality has been applied in many ways from health and safety to soft skills training, more recently it has also been seen to have a positive impact upon individuals emotion regulation.
This can can in turn allow effective management of emotions in specific situations and improve overall work output.
What is Emotion Regulation and why is it Important?
Emotion regulation can be defined as the process by which individuals influence the emotions they have, when they have them, and how they are experienced and expressed.
These processes can be automatic (unconscious) or controlled (conscious), and commonly involve the strategies of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal.
Expressive suppression involves reducing physical expressions in order to control positive or negative feelings of emotion, whereas cognitive reappraisal involves changing the meaning of the emotional event, therefore altering the emotional experience of it.
These emotions and feelings can be positive or negative, with emotion regulation allowing for them to be enhanced, diminished, effectively used and controlled.
Emotion regulation is important as it acts as a modifier, helping individuals to identify the most important pieces of information which can then be attended to without causing undesirable emotions for that specific situation.
Therefore, the way in which these emotions are felt and interpreted affects how an individual thinks, their decision making and consequent actions. How does Virtual Reality Deliver an Improvement in Emotion Regulation?
VR allows for the learning of more adaptive emotion regulation strategies to be experimented with and implemented into specific situations in the virtual world. The virtual world allows for recreation of realistic, yet digital, environments which can inspire new actions, increase awareness involving one’s emotions and thus allow modifications of the emotional response.
These virtual environments have been seen to be significantly effective in improving individuals’ emotion regulation, enhancing their emotion regulation skills.
This in turn can be applied to real life situations which cause an emotional response, therefore regulating their emotions effectively. Research has illustrated these reported benefits through the use of brain electrical activity software, which recorded and highlighted significant levels of activation in the brain regions when VR was implemented.
These brain regions were associated with the two emotional regulation strategies of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression.
Due to this, specific programmes have been developed in VR in order to train and enhance these strategies of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression.
These VR training programmes, which have been seen to improve emotion regulation, also facilitate the promotion of wellbeing, making them useful to implement within high stress virtual workplace environment simulations.
In turn, this will boost employee’s productivity and satisfaction due to negative emotions, such as stress and anxiety, being successfully addressed outside of the virtual environment.
Commercial Video Games have a Role too
Specifically, VR induces positive effects upon emotion regulation, but more broadly, so does playing commercial video games.
Video games are thought to promote emotion regulation in a similar way as VR, with the virtual environment offering a safe space in which differing emotion regulation strategies can be experimented with according to the situation.
They can be implemented in order to decrease negative emotions, such as stress as well as encouraging positive emotions, with high levels of immersion within video games thought to be responsible for the increased levels of emotion regulation effectiveness.
Furthering this, action video games specifically have been seen to enhance cognitive skills which are directly related to emotion regulation effectiveness. It can therefore be deduced that regularly playing video games provide a framework for effective emotion regulation.
How does VRE Utilise these Findings?
Interestingly, as mentioned above, high levels of immersion can be responsible for improved emotion regulation. Because of this, it would be appropriate to assume that VR would provide a more effective method for emotion regulation training compared to commercial video games due to its higher levels of immersion.
This can lead onto the topic of how VR environments can be a facilitator for successful emotion regulation in real life situations.
VRE implements the latest thinking in psychology and apply this to our VR teambuilding services and also our leadership and team development platforms.
Our VR services promote improved teamwork skills and as some workplace situations can cause negative emotions of stress, it is of benefit to identify how particular virtual environments within VR can be useful in facilitating improved emotion regulation in order to transfer these skills to the real-life workplace situations.
This can lead to improved decision making, productivity, teamwork and overall satisfaction of both employer and employee.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)