It feels real: physiological responses to a stressful virtual reality environment and its impact on working memory

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used to study and treat psychiatric disorders. Its fidelity depends in part on the extent to which the VR environment provides a convincing simulation, for example whether a putatively stressful VR situation actually produces a stress response.We studied the stress response in 28 healthy men exposed either to a stressor VR elevator (which simulated travelling up the outside of a tall building and culminated...