Chapter 4 74 Police agencies aim to create training situations that closely resemble real-world experiences (i.e. realistic or representative training). Current training practices rely heavily on scenariobased training—a method of designing training scenarios that replicate on-duty encounters and exposing trainees to duty-like experiences in training (Kleygrewe et al., 2022). By doing so, trainees learn to perform skills, such as situational awareness, communication, and decisionmaking concurrently while also experiencing psychophysiological stress (Andersen et al., 2016; Di Nota & Huhta, 2019). Training in a context that representatively reflects on-duty experiences has been shown to improve the performance of police officers on duty (Beinicke & Muff, 2019). When creating training contexts that resemble on-duty situations, similar constraints as those experienced on duty should be integrated into the training environment (Brunswik, 1956; Davids et al., 2013). For example, Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans (2010) included an opponent who occasionally shot back at the police officers with colored-soap cartridges in their study design. Compared to a less representative situation in which the opponent was non-threatening and did not shoot back, the police officers who could get shot by the opponent showed shooting behaviour and psychophysiological responses that resembled on-duty experiences much more closely: the police officers experienced significantly higher heart rates, had higher anxiety scores, acted faster, made themselves smaller, and blinked more often (Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2010). These findings (amon others, see Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2011; Renden et al., 2014) show that including representative constraints in a training setting, for instance, by adding an opponent who can physically threaten the police officer, induces on-duty-like responses and behaviours. Experiencing these responses and their influence on behaviour in training allows police officers to effectively prepare for duty (Di Nota & Huhta, 2019). Thus, designing training situations that closely resemble on-duty experiences should be as much of a goal for virtual simulation training as it is for real-life practice. In our current study, we investigate the addition of a pain stimulus to virtual training simulators in police training. We argue that adding a pain stimulus to the virtual simulators influences the representativeness of the virtual training environment. We expect that a more representative training context provokes stronger psychophysiological responses and would lead to an increased sense of ‘being there’ (i.e. sense of presence) in the virtual environment compared to a less-representative training context (North & North, 2016). Hence, our first hypothesis states that the addition of a pain stimulus to virtual training simulators increases the physical and psychological training responses of police officers. Similar to the study by Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans (2011), the pain stimulus in our study simulates the shooting back of a threatening opponent. To determine whether the addition of a pain stimulus influences the training responses of police officers, we assess physical responses, such as heart rate, and psychological responses,
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