Applying Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) to Evaluate the Affective Arousal Effects of VR Games

There are necessary procedures that apply self-assessment to evaluate subjects' emotions in the traditional affective stimulation systems. This paper describes a new attempt to use some of the VR games as emotional materials to arouse basic emotions and evaluate the affective arousal effects with Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). This provides an objective and active way to stimulate emotions (e.g. happiness, sadness, fear, relaxation, disgust, and rage) when players are immersed in VR games. In our study, we standardized the VR games for affective materials according to the picture, video, and audio in the traditional affective stimulation systems as references, and employed SAM to verify the validity of the Mehrabian emotion model. This is the first time an active approach has been used to evoke emotions through VR games, which serves as an alternative between cognitive psychology and computer science.