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Record W4411500959 · doi:10.3389/frvir.2025.1532991

Immersive videos of natural and urban environments can enhance awe and psychological well-being

2025· article· en· W4411500959 on OpenAlex
Lisa L. Barth, Fariba Mostajeran, Frank Steinicke, Bernhard E. Riecke, Simone Kühn

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueFrontiers in Virtual Reality · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedia Influence and Health
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAffect (linguistics)AnxietyImmersive technologyVirtual realityPsychologyNatural (archaeology)Baseline (sea)Applied psychologyCognitive psychologyComputer scienceHuman–computer interactionCommunicationGeography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Experiencing the emotion of awe has been associated with improvements in psychological wellbeing. 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 wellbeing, 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.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.279
Threshold uncertainty score0.419

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.019
GPT teacher head0.288
Teacher spread0.269 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it