A research about mood induction via virtual environments has been approached by the article Is virtual reality emotionally arousing? Investigating five emotion inducing virtual park scenarios [Felnhofer, A., Kothgassner, O. D., Schmidt, M., Heinzle, A. K., Beutl, L., Hlavacs, H., & Kryspin-Exner, I. (2015). Is virtual reality emotionally arousing? Investigating five emotion inducing virtual park scenarios. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.]. The study is designed to create different emotions in participants by placing them in different modifications of a virtual park environment. Five different parks have been designed in order to create joy, anger, boredom, anxiety and sadness. The emotions of the participants were measured by a quantitative and a qualitative method. Both measurements were taken during an initial relaxation phase. To quantify the emotional reaction of the participants, the electrodermal activity (EDA) was measured. However, this method is only able to provide information about the agitation level of the participants. It is not able to detect a certain emotion. Taken this into account, a more suitable quantitate method might have been chosen to quantify the emotions. Nevertheless, a significant difference between the agitation during the relaxation and the experiment phase has been measured. A distinction between the emotions invoked by the different virtual environments was proved by the analysis of collected qualitative data. This data has been gathered by a questionnaire in which they asked the participants to report the intention of the five emotions they wanted to create. The so collected data supported most of their theory even though they found out that some environments also created other unintended emotions. For example the environment which was supposed to create sadness also created a significant higher intension of anxiety and boredom. But this is not very surprising since negative and positive emotions are closely related and it is not always easy to distinguish between them. Thus, the environments might have created other than some of the five emotions in participants. But due to the narrowness of the questionnaire, which did not cover all possible emotional reactions, only partial insight into the effects of a virtual environment on emotions could be gained.
In conclusion it can be stated that it was a good choice to use a quantitative method to support the qualitative results. Because of this the researchers were able to present the persuasive conclusion that mood induction by a virtual environment is possible. Since all of the environments did not only influence one specific emotion, the qualitative data alone would not have been that meaningful.
Another problem I can see in the study is the lack of a clear foundation about how to design a environments for the purpose of invoking a certain emotion. For example, they used rain in one environment to create a feeling of sadness. But most of the participants felt rather calm instead of sad.
The paper Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play [Kilteni, K., Bergstrom, I., & Slater, M. (2013). Drumming in immersive virtual reality: the body shapes the way we play. Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on, 19(4), 597-605.] is build on the theory that behaviour and attitude is influenced by a person’s body. To prove this theory, the fact that people can receive the illusion of an ownership over a virtual body in an immersive virtual reality was taken into account. Based on this, the researchers created a virtual environment where study participants could observe themselves playing a drum with different virtual avatar bodies. The study was able to provide interesting results supporting the theory that a different body can influence our behaviour.
To gather results of the study, qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Quantitative data was collected by measuring and processing the body movement data of the participants while playing the drum. The collected data gives an objective impression about the perfomativity of the participants. Comparing the data with the reference data, a reliable value for the measuring can be obtained. But a common difficulty is to process the data into an adequate measuring. A lot of data had been collected by the move detecting sensors and it had to be transferred into another interpretable form. Otherwise it would just not have been possible to extract relevant information. In contrast to this, quantitative data, which is often collected by a questionnaire such as in the described study, can be easily analysed since it needs hardly any former manipulation to be interpretable. But a questionnaire is nearly always designed to support or negotiate a specific theory and therefore it is limited to certain aspects in advance.
Quantitative as well as qualitative research is important in the field of media technology. In my opinion qualitative data should always be supported by quantitative data so as to obtain a certain level of objectivity. Whereas I believe that quantitative data alone is sufficient to support a theory.
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