Virtual Reality and Food What Is the Effect of Exposure to Real, Compared
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Virtual Reality and Food What is the effect of exposure to real, compared to virtual foods, on physiological and psychological cue responses, and is this different in a hungry compared to a satiated condition? Emiel Culleton UNR: 1275300 Bachelor thesis Communication and Information Science Specialization: Human Aspects of Information Technology Tilburg University, Tilburg Supervisor: L.N. van der Laan April 2020 1 VIRTUAL REALITY AND FOOD E. CULLETON Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5 Theory ........................................................................................................................................ 6 Virtual Reality ........................................................................................................................ 6 Food cue reactivity ................................................................................................................. 7 Salivation ................................................................................................................................ 8 Cravings ................................................................................................................................. 9 Hunger .................................................................................................................................. 10 Method ..................................................................................................................................... 12 Design................................................................................................................................... 12 Participants ........................................................................................................................... 13 Materials ............................................................................................................................... 13 Stimuli .............................................................................................................................. 13 News articles ........................................................................................................................ 14 Saliva collection ............................................................................................................... 14 Variables............................................................................................................................... 14 Independent variables ....................................................................................................... 14 Dependent variables ......................................................................................................... 15 Presence ............................................................................................................................ 16 Control measures .............................................................................................................. 16 Lab setup .............................................................................................................................. 17 Procedure .............................................................................................................................. 17 Statistical analysis ................................................................................................................ 18 Results ...................................................................................................................................... 18 2 VIRTUAL REALITY AND FOOD E. CULLETON Main tests ............................................................................................................................. 20 Physiological cue response................................................................................................... 20 Discussion ................................................................................................................................ 23 Psychological cue response .................................................................................................. 24 Methodological considerations ............................................................................................ 26 Literature .................................................................................................................................. 29 Appendices .................................................................................................................................. i Appendix 1: News articles ...................................................................................................... i Appendix 1.1: Article 1 ....................................................................................................... i Appendix 1.2: Article 2 ...................................................................................................... v Appendix 1.3: Article 3 .................................................................................................... vii Appendix 2: iGroup Presence Items........................................................................................ i Appendix 3: Controls ............................................................................................................. ii Appendix 3.1: Regression analyses on the influence presence has on salivation and cravings ............................................................................................................................... ii Appendix 3.2: Independent t-tests controlling for the influence of gender on salivation and cravings .......................................................................................................................iii Appendix 3.3: Regression analyses controlling for the influence of age on salivation and cravings ............................................................................................................................... v Appendix 3.4: Regression analyses controlling for the influence of Body Mass Index (BMI) on salivation and cravings ..................................................................................... vii 3 VIRTUAL REALITY AND FOOD E. CULLETON Abstract A notable trend in the use of VR is the use of VR in food related therapy. VR provides a higher sense of presence than printed images, which makes the experience more realistic. Previous research suggests that a higher sense of presences in VR provokes stronger cue responses. However, because VR is still relatively new, very few studies have been done regarding how people react to virtual food cues. A within-subjects design was conducted in which participants visited the lab twice: once in a hungry state and once in a satiated state in order to see the effect hunger has on food cue responses. During the experiment, participants’ physiological and psychological cue responses were measured after exposing them to chocolate and wooden tangram puzzle pieces in both VR and in real life. This resulted in four different conditions: VR food, VR non-food, real food and real non-food. The results show that participants experienced similar psychological cue responses after exposure to regular food cues and virtual food cues. These psychological cue responses were also stronger after exposure to both regular and virtual food cues when they were food deprived than when they were satiated. These similarities were not found for physiological cue responses. It is possible that the perceived presence during this study was high enough for the psychological cue responses to be stimulated, but too low to stimulate physiological cue responses. The results found in this study imply that VR technology has a place in food related therapy. 4 VIRTUAL REALITY AND FOOD E. CULLETON Introduction As Virtual Reality (VR) rises in popularity, its applications have become widespread. This could be explained by the heightened sense of presence people experience in VR, compared to when being shown images on a computer or printed images (Rothbaum, Anderson, Zimand, Hodges, Lang, & Wilson, 2006). One of its many applications is food-related therapy (Perpiñá, Botella & Baños, 2003; Lee, Kwon, Choi & Yang, 2007; Gorini, Griez, Petrova & Riva, 2010). This type of therapy uses food cue exposure therapy, which is a form of therapy where people are exposed repeatedly to food cues without being allowed to eat, until their reactivity decreases (Mattes, 1997; Jansen, Schyns, Bongers & van den Akker, 2016; Schyns, van den Akker, Roefs, Houben & Jansen, 2019). Food cue therapy, however, provokes both strong physiological and psychological reactions (Cooney, Baker, Pomerleau & Josephy, 1984; Nederkoorn, Smulders & Jansen, 2000). The great amount of control VR cue exposure therapy provides is beneficial as VR technology enables therapists to gradually increase the intensity of the therapeutic exercise. Where regular exposure therapy usually places patients directly facing their fear in vivo, VR offers the opportunity to be an intermediate step between a safe environment and the real object of fear (Botella, Baños, Villa, Perpiñá & García-Palacios, 2000). Various studies have highlighted the successful use of VR in food cue exposure therapy. Examples being the experiments of Perpiñá et