No pain, no gain? The effects of adding a pain stimulus in virtual training for police officers

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Virtual training systems provide highly realistic training environments for police. This study assesses whether a pain stimulus can enhance the training responses and sense of the presence of these systems. Police officers (n = 219) were trained either with or without a pain stimulus in a 2D simulator (VirTra V-300) and a 3D virtual reality (VR) system. Two (training simulator) × 2 (pain stimulus) ANOVAs revealed a significant interaction effect for perceived stress (p =.010, η<sub>p</sub><sup>2</sup> =.039). Post-hoc pairwise comparisons showed that VR provokes significantly higher levels of perceived stress compared to VirTra when no pain stimulus is used (p =.009). With a pain stimulus, VirTra training provokes significantly higher levels of perceived stress compared to VirTra training without a pain stimulus (p <.001). Sense of presence was unaffected by the pain stimulus in both training systems. Our results indicate that VR training appears sufficiently realistic without adding a pain stimulus. Practitioner summary: Virtual police training benefits from highly realistic training environments. This study found that adding a pain stimulus heightened perceived stress in a 2D simulator, whereas it influenced neither training responses nor sense of presence in a VR system. VR training appears sufficiently realistic without adding a pain stimulus.

Reference Kleygrewe, L., Hutter, R. I., & Oudejans, R. R. D. (2023). No pain, no gain? The effects of adding a pain stimulus in virtual training for police officers. Ergonomics, 66(10), 1608-1621. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139.2022.2157496
Published by  Urban Vitality 1 January 2023

Publication date

Jan 2023

Author(s)

Lisanne Kleygrewe
R. I. (Vana) Hutter

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