Investigating Subjective Anxiety Dynamics due to Personal Space Violations and COVID-19-related Stressors in a Social VR Simulation

Personal space is the preferred physical distance people maintain from others, and its invasion causes stress and anxiety, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study presents a novel social virtual reality (VR) paradigm to investigate anxiety dynamics due to personal space invasion during an active task. Participants were given a goal-finding task, navigating in a VR environment with virtual agents that entered their personal space at varying distances and sometimes exhibited COVID-19 stressors (coughing). Participants then provided a real-time annotation of their subjective anxiety while watching first-person videos of their exploration. Analyzing the emotional responses of a large sample of N=109 participants during the pandemic, the study identified three key findings: 1) invasion of personal space increased anxiety, with both shorter distances and more agents leading to higher anxiety levels; 2) close-by coughing events increased subjective anxiety; 3) goal-achievement significantly reduced anxiety, counteracting other stressors.