No Pain, No Gain? The Effects of Adding a Pain Stimulus in Virtual Training for Police Officers 4 87 weight of the VR gear in VR training). The ANOVAs showed no other significant interaction effects between the training simulator and pain stimulus or main effects for pain stimulus (see Table 4.2 for statistics). Sense of presence The ANOVAs revealed significant main effects for the training simulator, indicating that spatial presence and negative effects were experienced significantly higher/more frequently in VR compared to VirTra. ANOVAs on the sense of presence measures showed no statistically significant interactions between the training simulator and pain stimulus. No statistically significant main effects were found for pain stimulus (see Table 4.2 for statistics). DISCUSSION In the present study, we investigated the influence of a pain stimulus on the training responses and sense of presence in two different types of training simulators: the interactive 2D simulator VirTra V-300 and the 3D police-specific VR system from Refense. We expected that adding a pain stimulus to the virtual training simulator would have an effect on representativeness as it adds (i) a physical threat that is also present in real life to the training and (ii) a sensory stimulus to the audiovisual stimuli present in virtual training simulators. Thus, we first hypothesised that training responses with a pain stimulus would be higher than without a pain stimulus. Secondly, we hypothesised that the sense of presence with a pain stimulus would be higher than without a pain stimulus. First, to address hypothesis 1, we found that the addition of a pain stimulus influenced the perceived stress of police officers in the VirTra training whereas it did not in VR training. Police officers who trained in the VirTra simulator with the pain stimulus experienced significantly higher perceived stress compared to those who did not train with a pain stimulus in VirTra. Additionally, we found that perceived stress was significantly higher in VR compared to VirTra when no pain stimulus was used. A main difference between the two virtual training simulators seems therefore to be the psychological training responses the simulators themselves provoke. While perceived stress and mental effort were relatively low in the VirTra training without a pain stimulus, they are comparatively high in VR without a pain stimulus and do not significantly increase when adding a pain stimulus. However, adding a pain stimulus to VirTra increases psychological training responses and matches the level of responses in VR (see Figure 4.4). A possible explanation for this effect may be that in VR, the psychological training responses are already at such a high level that adding a pain stimulus may not influence the perceived stress or mental effort any further. Compared to recent literature assessing perceived stress in police
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