No Pain, No Gain? The Effects of Adding a Pain Stimulus in Virtual Training for Police Officers 4 81 and communication skills) and closely resembled the training tasks of the VR training. In the first scenario, participants were placed in an urban environment in which they had to identify sudden threats in the 300-degree environment, communicate their surroundings to each other, and decide whether to engage in any of the threats or call for back up (e.g. when they saw an armed perpetrator through the window of a building). In the second scenario, the participants entered a school building in which an active shooter had to be identified and eliminated. In the third scenario, the participants faced an armed suspect who threatened to kill herself with a knife. The participants had to use tactical movement, communication, and de-escalation skills to resolve the situations safely. After the participants performed a scenario, they received short feedback on their performance before they proceeded with the next scenario. Pain stimulus All participants in the pain stimulus conditions wore a pain stimulus device during the VR and VirTra training, irrespective of whether a pain stimulus was delivered or not. In VR, the pain stimulus was delivered using the StressX PRO belt from StressVest (www. stressvest.com). Participants wore the belt around the hip so that a safe, localised electrical stimulus via six electrodes on the device would be delivered to the lower abdomen. The device features an adjustable shock level (1 = low to 5 = extreme). For this experiment, the shock level setting 2 was used for all participants who trained with the pain stimulus. In VirTra, the pain stimulus was delivered using the V-Threat-Fire (https://www.virtra.com/tool/ law-enforcement-threat-fire/), an electric feedback device that is integrated into the VirTra V-300 simulator. The device was clipped onto the participant’s belt or placed in the back pocket of the participants’ pants (depending on the participant’s preferences). In both conditions, the localised stimuli were delivered by the trainer in accordance with the development of the scenario; for instance, when a participant was shot by a perpetrator in the scenario, the trainer would deliver the pain stimulus immediately to simulate getting shot. The electric impulses elicited by both devices were strong enough that the participants momentarily recoiled. All participants were familiar with the use and sensation of a pain stimulus from previous trainings. Participants were given the option to refrain from wearing a pain stimulus in the training and hence be excluded from the experiment. None of the participants refused to train with the pain stimulus.
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