ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1532991
Immersive Videos of Natural and Urban Environments Can Enhance Awe and Psychological Well-being
Provisionally accepted- 1University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
- 2Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
- 3Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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Experiencing the emotion of awe has been associated with improvements in psychological well-being. This emotion can be systematically elicited in laboratory settings and immersive virtual reality (VR) has been shown effective for this purpose. In this work, we exposed 36 healthy participants to three immersive videos from natural and urban scenes (i.e., mountain, forest with waterfall, and city), and a 3D model of a neutral room as a baseline condition. These environments were compared in terms of self-reported levels of awe and clinically relevant aspects of psychological well-being, such as state depression and anxiety. In addition, we took the level of prior experience of the participants with VR into account and investigated whether the psychological effects hold for both novice and experienced VR users. The results suggest that exposure to all three immersive videos elevated the level of awe, reduced current states of depression, and increased positive affect compared to the baseline. We also discovered that, while the urban environment elicited the same amount of awe as both natural environments, only exposure to natural environments decreased current states of anxiety and negative affect.Finally, although experienced VR users had partly lower overall scores, prior experience did not reduce the relative benefits of exposure to immersive videos, as both experienced and novice users showed similar improvements compared to their respective baselines. Our findings can help guide future research and therapeutic applications that use immersive videos to harness the psychological benefits of experiencing awe.
Keywords: virtual reality, Immersive videos, Emotion induction, awe, natural environment, Well-being, Mental Health
Received: 22 Nov 2024; Accepted: 02 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Barth, Mostajeran, Steinicke, Riecke and Kühn. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fariba Mostajeran, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
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