Effects of emotional sounds on the performance of activities of daily living in immersive virtual reality: a pilot study

Previous literature suggests that highly arousing emotional stimuli can either interfere with or enhance performance in visual attention tasks compared to neutral and low arousing stimuli, with effects often depending on the specific paradigm and sensory modality. However, by convention, studies typically employ behavioral paradigms that offer low ecological validity. The present pilot study investigated the impact of emotionally arousing auditory stimuli (high, low, and neutral) on attentional performance during ecologically enhanced activities of daily living using immersive virtual reality (VR). Thirty-nine participants performed three VR-based tasks (cake, fridge, and shoes) under high, low or neutral arousing sound conditions. Behavioral measures included task execution time and spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR). Results indicated that arousal-related effects on execution time were small-to-moderate and associated with substantial uncertainty. By comparison, task characteristics followed by order effects better accounted for variability in execution time. No significant effects were observedin sEBR. Thus, while preliminary, these findings provide insight into how emotional auditory stimuli may influence attentional performance in ecologically enhanced contexts and highlight the potential of immersive VR for investigating emotion–attention interactions in realistic settings. Future research with larger study samples is warranted.