Clouded judgments? The role of virtual weather in word valence evaluations

ABSTRACT

Exploring the dynamic interface of environmental psychology and psycholinguistics, this investigation delves into how simulated weather conditions – sunny versus rainy – affect emotional perceptions of linguistic stimuli within a Virtual Reality (VR) framework. Participants assessed words’ emotional valence being exposed to these distinct environmental simulations. Contrary to expectations, we found that while rainy conditions modestly prolonged response times, they did not significantly alter the emotional valence attributed to words. Our study shows that weather can affect emotional cognition, but intrinsic emotional word properties are resilient to environmental influences. This highlights the complex interplay between environmental factors and linguistic processing and reaffirms the importance of environmental contexts in cognitive and emotional evaluations, especially in the face of climate change. By integrating VR technology with environmental psychology and linguistics, our research offers novel insights into the subtle yet significant ways in which virtual and real-world environments converge to shape human emotional and cognitive responses.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual reality
• emotion
• valence rating
• weather conditions

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank all participants for their invaluable contributions and time dedicated to this research. We also thank Laís Muntini for her help and involvement during the initial stages of a pilot study on this topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Conceptualization: JAD; Software/Concept implementation: FR; data acquisition: FR; data analysis: FR and JAD; writing and revision: FR and JAD.

Data availability statement

Data is available in the Open Science Framework repository, accessible via the following link: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3KJTU

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Supplemental online material

The following supporting information can be downloaded (i.e. video samples of the VR tasks): https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3KJTU

Notes

1 This analysis was run separately per request of an anonymous reviewer given that these items were initially selected as fillers and the number of stimuli did not match that of the items in critical conditions.

2 Considering that gender differences in emotional processing have been consistently reported in the literature (Deng et al., 2016; Donges & Suslow, 2017), we opted for including this factor in the structure.

Additional information

Funding

The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation partially supported this work under grant PID2021-126884NB-I00 (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).