Digitally Mediated Contact With Chinese Settings: Presence and Emotional Experience Across Repeated Virtual Reality Sessions

Geographic relocation can disrupt access to meaningful places as well as social relationships. This study examined emotional and physiological experience during repeated encounters with virtual-reality scenes depicting Chinese environmental settings. Thirty-two Chinese international students completed nine immersive sessions across a traditional garden, commercial street, and residential neighbourhood. Within each landscape block, participants experienced no dialogue, generic AI dialogue, and regionally personalised AI dialogue in a common sequence. Homesickness, positive and negative affect, perceived presence, heart rate, and electrodermal activity were assessed before and throughout the protocol. Mixed-effects models separated session-level variation in presence from stable between-person differences. Sessions characterised by higher-than-usual presence were accompanied by higher positive affect and homesickness, and mean presence was positively associated with positive affect. These associations remained in sensitivity analyses using non-overlapping presence and positive-affect items and models adjusted for landscape block and dialogue position. Across the protocol, mean negative affect and heart rate were lower than the single pre-exposure baseline. These protocol-level comparisons describe differences observed across the common fixed sequence. Overall, the findings distinguish homesickness from general affect and show that perceived presence relates to these dimensions of experience in different ways following geographic relocation.