Venturing through storm and stress. A virtual reality app for the assessment of Emotional Sensitivity

Research has shown that emotion (dys)regulation is a central feature in adolescence, resulting from the mutual interactions between neurobiological and temperamental features. Indeed, a lack in the ability to regulate affective states is related to a wide range of pathological outcomes and behavioral problems. Emotional sensitivity (ES) is a dispositional feature that drives individuals to perceive more negative emotions in response to a broad range of stimuli and has been shown to foster maladaptive emotion regulation strategies both in clinical and non-clinical populations. Nevertheless, ES has not been uniquely operationalized and studied. This contribution's main objective is to suggest the development of a Virtual Reality (VR) app for assessing ES through different custom-made scenarios. A group of adolescents and a group of young adults will participate in 20-minute evaluations using a new technological app to assess ES via a head-tracked Head Mounted Display (HMD). Each subject might be inside an emotionally neutral, positive, or negative social environment. The subject must try to recognize different emotions in specific characters (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise) and then rate his/her emotional experience after every task. A validated device will record Heart Rate Variability as a further measure of emotion regulation. This innovative app allows us to explore ES in an ecological and valid environment, providing useful information on it as a result of the multilevel associations between self-reported and physiological levels of emotional activation, emotion recognition, and cognitive reappraisal. The ES app will provide reliable information for clinical use and research.