Social Interaction and Pain Threshold in Virtual Reality
Andrea Stevenson Won, Swati Pandita & Kaylee Payne Kruzan
This experiment examined the effects of social presence and perceived location of a virtual environment on participants’ pain thresholds in a pre-registered, within-subjects experiment. First, we examined the effects of social interaction vs being alone in a virtual environment. Second, we compared a virtual environment representing a remote location to a replication of the lab environment. While the "location" of the virtual environment did affect social presence, such that participants reported greater social presence with...