Effects of Daylight Intensity on Emotion Regulation in a Virtual Healing Space

Abstract

With increasing social pressure, the youth population in colleges and universities generally faces increasingly severe negative emotional problems, which not only affect academic performance but also significantly reduce the quality of daily life. In response to this challenge, numerous educational institutions have established psychological healing rooms to provide emotional support and stress management services. However, existing psychological healing spaces often fail to achieve the expected healing effects and affect student engagement due to a lack of sufficient privacy and interactivity. To address this issue, this study proposes a virtual psychological healing space design based on the audiovisual fusion effect, aiming to improve students' emotional regulation and mental health management by enhancing privacy and interactivity. The design prototype incorporates four natural environments: water and sky, woodland and sky, grassland and sky, and elemental uniform distribution environments. Each environment is paired with customized Lofi music to enhance the healing effect through a multi-sensory experience. Additionally, by utilizing Unreal Engine's dynamic sky and weather simulation system for natural light, real-time transitions between four lighting environments (early morning, midday, dusk, and night) were achieved in virtual reality to explore the specific effects of light intensity on emotion regulation. This study surveyed 30 college student participants to collect the subjective effects of environmental lighting on emotions in a virtual healing space through semi-structured interviews. This study demonstrates that varying lighting conditions have a significant impact on participants' emotional states. It underscores the critical necessity of customizing lighting to accommodate the specific needs of users in the design of virtual healing spaces, thereby minimizing the influence of inter-individual differences on therapeutic outcomes. The results of this study provide an empirical basis for designing virtual healing spaces and are expected to offer a theoretical reference and practical basis for implementing personalized healing strategies in virtual environments.

Keywords: Virtual Healing Spaces, Emotion Regulation, Daylight Intensity, Unreal Engine Simulation

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005685