Using Skin Conductance to Predict Awe and Perceived Vastness in Virtual Reality

Awe is an emotion characterized by the perception of vastness and the need to accommodate this vastness into one's mental framework. We propose an elicitation scene to induce awe in Virtual Reality (VR), validate it through self-report, and explore the feasibility of using skin conductance to predict self-reported awe and vastness as labeled from the stimuli in VR. Sixty-two participants took part in the study comparing the awe-eliciting space scene and a neutral scene. The space scene was confirmed as more awe-eliciting. A k-nearest neighbor algorithm confirmed high and low-awe score clusters used to label the data. A Random Forest algorithm achieved 65 % accuracy <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(F1=0.56, AUC=0.73$</tex> when predicting the self-reported low and high awe categories from continuous skin conductance data. A similar approach achieved 55 % accuracy <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(F1\ =0.59,\ AUC=0.56)$</tex> when predicting the perception of vastness. These results underscore the potential of skin-conductance-based algorithms to predict awe.