No Pain, No Gain? The Effects of Adding a Pain Stimulus in Virtual Training for Police Officers 4 83 all VR scenarios were completed). The stress scale was assessed on a VAS from 1 to 100. The original anxiety scale has a fair validity and test-retest reliability with correlation coefficients ranging between 0.60 and 0.78 (Houtman & Bakker, 1989). Sense of presence The experiences in the virtual environment were assessed using the ITC-Sense of Presence Inventory (ITC-SOPI; Lessiter et al., 2001). Each item of the inventory is rated on a Likert-scale from 1 ‘strongly disagree’ to 5 ‘strongly agree’. The ITC-SOPI results in four factors. Spatial presence refers to the sense of being part of the virtual environment. Engagement refers to the feeling of involvement with the content and feeling psychologically engaged. Ecological validity or naturalness refers to the tendency of perceiving the virtual environment as life-like and natural. Negative effects refer to the experience of any adverse physiological experiences, such as dizziness or headaches (Lessiter et al., 2001). According to (Lessiter et al., 2001), the ITC SOPI has good internal consistency. The Cronbach alpha coefficient for spatial presence was .94, for engagement .89, for ecological validity .76, and for negative effect .77. In the current study, the Cronbach alpha coefficient for the factor spatial presence was .89, for the factor engagement .80, for the factor ecological validity .74, and for the factor negative effect .83. Procedure Each experimental day started at the location of the Stadtpolizei Zürich. At the start of the experiment, participants received information about the training day, the training objectives, and general information about the experiment. Participants then provided written informed consent. Next, participants were taken to the VR training location. At the VR location, participants took off their police-specific gear (weapon, belt, vest), were equipped with a Zephyr heart rate monitor (for those training with the pain stimulus, they were also equipped with the pain belt), and then got fitted into the VR gear. The first four participants completed the VR training scenarios. After the VR training was completed, participants took off the VR gear (and pain belt, if training with pain stimulus) and received a short after-action review of their training performance (∼5 min). Because the after-action review was considered an integral part of the training session, participants filled in the visual analogue scales and the ITC-SOPI questionnaire using iPads right after the review was completed (instead of immediately after the scenario execution). As soon as the first group of four participants completed the training scenario, the second group of four participants completed the same sequence. Once the second group finished the training, the 5-min after-action review, and filled in the questionnaires, participants
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