Personality and Presence in Virtual Reality: Does Their Relationship Depend on the Used Presence Measure?

In virtual reality (VR) applications the user's subjective experiences and responses to the same VR technology, like the presence experience, can differ enormously between people. Such interindividual differences are not well examined yet. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between personality variables and presence in VR. Thirty female participants completed different personality questionnaires before they were exposed to an interactive and immersive virtual environment. Afterward, they completed various presence questionnaires to determine whether correlations between personality and presence depend on the used presence measure, or if different presence questionnaires reveal comparable results. Significant positive correlations were found among the different presence questionnaires. Nevertheless, personality variables like impulsive tendencies, empathy, locus of control, or the Big Five personality traits showed heterogeneous correlations with presence, depending on the presence questionnaire used. Absorption seemed to be the best predictor for the feeling of presence in VR and showed the strongest relationship with presence, independent of the used presence measure. Mental imagination, perspective taking, and immersive tendencies showed significant correlations with presence too, which were comparable between different presence measures. Hence, to find valid and meaningful relationships between personality variables and presence in VR it is beneficial to use different measures to assess presence. This work was partially supported by the Neuro Center Styria (NCS) in Graz, Austria and the European Community Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007 2013), Grant Agreement nr. 258169. We are grateful to M. Pröll, M. Lancelle, V. Settgast, and D. Fellner of the Institute of Computer Graphics and Knowledge Visualization (Graz University of Technology) for technical assistance and to Guilherme Wood for proofreading the manuscript.

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