Cybersickness and anxiety in virtual environments

The question whether feelings of anxiety are confounded with cybersickness in studies on virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) was raised since the questionnaires used to measure them contain overlapping items. In the experiment, 88 participants were asked to talk in front of a virtual audience. Previous research has shown that this task may induce feelings of anxiety [1]. A significant correlation between levels of experienced anxiety and the nausea subscale of the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire was found for people who reported no cybersickness in a virtual neutral world. Therefore it must be concluded that when cybersickness is measured in VRET experiments, the results may partly be explained by feelings of anxiety rather than cybersickness per se.