UCLIC Seminar, 26 June 2025, Gina Grimshaw

Title: Feeling Virtual: Increasing the ecological validity of emotion research with virtual reality Speaker: Gina Grimshaw (Victoria University of Wellington) Date: 26 June 2025, 15:00-16:00 Abstract: Emotions are complex states that involve physiological changes, behavioural action tendencies, and subjective feelings. These states in turn affect how we perceive, remember, and act in the world. Despite these complexities, experimental research on human emotions has traditionally involved weak inductions of emotion – using pictures, faces, or perhaps videos – in sterile laboratory environments, while our participants are held motionless, constrained by chinrests and tethered to recording equipment. These lab-based approaches have offered some insights into how people respond to emotional stimuli, but do not induce authentic emotional states or permit the range of behaviours that emotions typically entail. Over the past six years, our lab has been developing alternative research methods using highly immersive virtual reality to induce fear, awe, and disgust, and to determine how these states affect attention, self-regulation, and cognitive control. VR provides solutions for several challenges in emotion research. It allows us to induce strong emotional responses and permit a wide range of natural behaviours, while still maintaining experimental control of the environment and simultaneously tracking physiological and neural responses, eye-movements, and body position. In this talk I’ll describe our process of creating and validating emotional scenarios, and the outcomes of a series of experiments on how emotional states affect attention and cognitive control. Bio: Professor Gina Grimshaw is a cognitive scientist who leads the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the nature of emotional states and their interactions with other cognitive systems. She collaborates closely with researchers in computer science and human-computer interaction to develop novel methods using virtual reality to both induce and track emotional experiences. She is also a strong advocate of open science practices to increase the credibility of research findings and accelerate the progress of scientific research through sharing of materials and data. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health (US), the Marsden Fund (NZ), and the Department of Conservation (NZ).