When virtual reality becomes psychoneuroendocrine reality: A stress(or) review

This review article was awarded the Dirk Hellhammer award from ISPNE in 2023. It explores the dynamic relationship between stressors and stress from a historical view as well as a vision towards the future of stress research via virtual reality (VR). We introduce the concept of a “syncytium,” a permeable boundary that blurs the distinction between stress and stressor, in order to understand why the field of stress biology continues to inadequately measure stress alone as a proxy for the force of external stressors. Using Virtual Reality (VR) as an illustrative example to explicate the black box of stressors, we examine the distinction between 'immersion' and 'presence' as analogous terms for stressor and stress, respectively. We argue that the conventional psychological approaches to stress measurement and appraisal theory unfortunately fall short in quantifying the force of the stressor, leading to reverse causality fallacies. Further, the concept of affordances is introduced as an ecological or holistic tool to measure and design a stressor's force, bridging the gap between the external environment and an individual's physiological response to stress. Affordances also serve to ameliorate shortcomings in stress appraisal by integrating ecological interdependencies. By combining VR and psychobiological measures, this paper aims to unravel the complexity of the stressor-stress syncytium, highlighting the necessity of assessing both the internal and external facets to gain a holistic understanding of stress physiology and shift away from reverse causality reasoning. We find that the utility of VR extends beyond presence to include affordance-based measures of immersion, which can effectively model stressor force. Future research should prioritize the development of tools that can measure both immersion and presence, thereby providing a more comprehensive understanding of how external stressors interact with individual psychological states.