Author Identifier (ORCID)
Shane L. Rogers: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6869-3400
Abstract
Featured Application: This study informs the design of virtual environments for therapeutic and emotionally meaningful conversations delivered through VR platforms. The findings show that nature-themed environments, particularly virtual blue spaces, can enhance users’ comfort and calmness when disclosing personal experiences. These results can guide developers of VR counselling systems, digital mental-health tools, and conversational-agent platforms in selecting or tailoring virtual environments that promote psychological safety and ease of communication. Virtual reality (VR) offers new opportunities for delivering psychologically meaningful conversations in digitally mediated settings. This study examined how environmental designs influence user experience during emotionally relevant self-disclosure. Fifty university students completed a within-subjects experiment in which they engaged in a structured positive and negative self-disclosure task across four immersive environments (seaside, garden, urban, and sci-fi). After each interaction, participants rated six experiential dimensions relevant to therapeutic communication: comfort, calmness, pleasantness, focus, privacy, and perceived overall suitability for psychological therapy. Repeated-measures analyses showed that nature-themed environments were rated more positively than non-nature environments across all dimensions. Although the seaside and garden environments did not differ in overall composite ratings, the seaside setting was most frequently preferred for comfort, calmness, and pleasantness in participants’ final rankings. These findings demonstrate that virtual environment design meaningfully shapes users’ emotional and interpersonal experience in VR, highlighting the value of nature-based environments for VR counselling systems and digital mental-health applications.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
1-1-2026
Volume
16
Issue
1
Publication Title
Applied Sciences Switzerland
Publisher
MDPI
School
School of Arts and Humanities
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Rogers, S. L., Canes, T., & Pallister, A. (2025). User experience in virtual self-disclosure: Appraising natural, urban, and artificial VR environments. Applied Sciences, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/app16010033