Simo Järvelä

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Researcher at University of Helsinki

Social performance situations, often crucial and expected in today’s work contexts, can be perceived as highly challenging and stressful. Therefore, experiencing anxiety in public speaking situations can have a negative impact on individuals’ working lives and career prospects. Virtual reality environments offer novel means to practise public speak...

Enhancing the experience of virtual reality (VR) through haptic feedback could benefit applications from leisure to rehabilitation and training. Devices which provide more realistic kinesthetic (force) feedback appear to hold more promise than their simpler vibrotactile counterparts. However, our understanding of kinesthetic feedback on virtual emb...

This study examines the effects of a role-play-based pedagogical method in Finland on the twenty-first century skills propensity among 6th graders (12-year-olds). The approach entails a simulation of a society in a gamified learning environment as part of their formal education. Structural Equation Modeling was employed to analyze the students' (N...

Teachers are continuously challenged with questions of how to meaningfully convey skills of modern society, i.e., 21st century, to young children. Increasingly, gameful methods and playful learning environments are employed in formal education to enhance teaching. This paper examines a physical learning environment of Yrityskylä in Finland, which s...

Social performance situations often constitute one of the most challenging communication tasks across different cultures. In today's work environments, giving presentations and performing in front of others are often essential and expected. Therefore, public speaking anxiety can have a serious impact on an individual's job performance, career choic...

Storifying gameful designs helps to engage players with desirable behavioral implications via enhanced narrative experience, the benefits of which are particularly prominent for developing serious mobile games to overcome their technical and contextual constraints. To understand the multifaceted nature of players’ narrative engagement with storifie...

Recently, there has been a burgeoning of immersive virtual reality (VR) applications in a variety of shapes, including gameful social VR. Despite a longstanding tradition of studying social factors in gameful computing, this perspective in the specific experiences of VR is only gaining traction. This highly multidisciplinary area of interest is imm...

The tendency to simulate the pain of others within our own sensorimotor systems is a vital component of empathy. However, this sensorimotor resonance is modulated by a multitude of social factors including similarity in bodily appearance, e.g. skin colour. The current study investigated whether increasing self-other similarity via virtual transfer...

Supplementary material for the publication "Increasing self–other similarity modulates ethnic bias in sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain". The material entails a supplementary method section, tables, and figures.

In a novel experimental setting, we augmented a variation of traditional compassion meditation with our custom-built VR environment for multiple concurrent users. The presence of another user’s avatar in shared virtual space supports social interactions and provides an active target for evoked compassion. The system incorporates respiration and bra...

C omputer games have already proved useful beyond their function as entertainment. Among others, they serve as a great resource for research by providing realistic, familiar, and yet relatively complex and diverse stimuli for experiments. However, the same features that make them potentially useful also make them particularly challenging to use in...

We investigate the relationship of morality and political orientation by focusing on the influential results showing that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. We conducted a comprehensive literature search from major databases and other sources for primary studies that used the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and a typica...

Psychophysiology is a method of measuring physiological signals, such as heart rate or brain waves, and making psychological inferences based on them. The joint changes of physiological signals within a dyad – physiological synchrony – can also be assessed. In previous studies, synchrony measures have been linked to various affective and social phe...

We investigate the findings that liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations. We conducted a comprehensive literature search from major databases and other sources for primary studies that used the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and a typical measure of political orientation, a political self-placement item. We used a predefined...

With the advent of consumer grade virtual reality (VR) headsets and physiological measurement devices, new possibilities for mediated social interaction emerge enabling the immersion to environments where the visual features react to the users’ physiological activation. In this study, we investigated whether and how individual and interpersonally s...

In a novel experimental setting, we augmented a variation of traditional compassion meditation with our custom built VR environment for multiple concurrent users. The system incorporates respiration and brainwave based biofeedback that enables responsiveness to the shared physiological states of the users. The presence of another user's avatar in t...

The effects of bio-adaptation-based visual cues in conveying affective information was studied while conducting social meditation in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In a laboratory study, 22 dyads practiced a short duration, modified version of empathy-evoking compassion meditation. The immersive VR provided electroencephalography (EEG) -based...

Meditation and mindfulness techniques are useful for both treatment of various disorders as well as improving the quality of life in general. Meditation offers intriguing possibilities for BCI as it is targeted at able-bodied general population and goes beyond the traditional explicit control BCI paradigm. In previous work, we have shown how neurof...

Selling in-game content has become a popular revenue model for game publishers. While prior research has investigated latent motivations as determinants of in-game content purchases, the prior literature has not focused on more concrete reasons to purchase in-game content that stem from how the games are being designed. We form an inventory of reas...

Meditation in general and mindfulness in particular have been shown to be useful techniques in the treatment of a plethora of ailments, yet they can be challenging for novices. We present RelaWorld: a neuroadaptive virtual reality meditation system that combines virtual reality with neurofeedback to provide a tool that is easy for novices to use ye...

I Kivikangas, J. M., Chanel, G., Cowley, B., Ekman, I., Salminen, M., Järvelä, S., & Ravaja, N. (2011). A review of the use of psychophysiological methods in game research. Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, 3(3), 181–199. II Kivikangas, J. M. (in press). Affect channel model of evaluation in the context of digital games. In G. Yannakakis and K....

We investigated how technologically mediating two different components of emotion—communicative expression and physiological state—to group members affects physiological linkage and self-reported feelings in a small group during video viewing. In different conditions the availability of second screen text chat (communicative expression) and visuali...

Previous research indicates that males prefer competition over cooperation, and it is sometimes suggested that females show the opposite behavioral preference. In the present article, we investigate the emotions behind the preferences: Do males exhibit more positive emotions during competitive than cooperative activities, and do females show the op...

Digital games offer rich media content and engaging action, accessible individually or in groups collaborating or competing against each other. This makes them promising for use as a stimulus in research settings. This paper examines the advantages and challenges of using games in experimental research with particular focus on strict stimulus contr...

We report research on player modeling using psychophysiology and machine learning, conducted through interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers of computer science, psychology, and game design at Aalto University, Helsinki. First, we propose the Play Patterns And eXperience (PPAX) framework to connect three levels of game experience that p...

Dyadic gaming experience was studied in a psychophysiological experiment where conflict structure and the presence of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent in a turn-based game were varied in four different conditions. Electrocardiographic and electrodermal activity signals of 41 same-gender dyads were recorded to study joint changes in their physi...

IN DAILY LIFE, WE OFTEN COPY THE GESTURES AND EXPRESSIONS OF THOSE WE COMMUNICATE WITH, BUT RECENT EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT SUCH MIMICRY HAS A PHYSIOLOGICAL COUNTERPART: interaction elicits linkage, which is a concordance between the biological signals of those involved. To find out how the type of social interaction affects linkage, pairs of participan...

Popular abstract-The article proposes that the theories of grounded cognition and embodiment can be utilized in explaining the role-playing experience. Embodied cognition theories assume that cognition is not only a feature of the brain, but the body as a whole and it is interaction with the environment it operates in. Grounded cognition proposes t...

International Journal of Role-playing 3: Full Issue Table of Contents J. Tuomas Harviainen, "Editorial" The year and a half since the publication of issue two has both seen incredible formal advancements within the study of role-playing as well as witnessed several cases of people trying to reinvent the proverbial wheel, or to improve it while not...

Psychophysiological methodology has been successfully applied to investigate media responses, including the experience of playing digital games. The approach has many benefits for a player experience assessment—it can provide detailed, unbiased, and time-accurate data without interrupting the gameplay. However, gaming can be a highly social activit...

This article reviews the psychophysiological method in game research. Psychophysiological measurements provide an objective, continuous, real-time, noninvasive, precise and sensitive way to assess the game experience. However, the best results require controlled experiments with careful monitoring of variables, large enough sample sizes and experti...

This paper reviews the psychophysiological method in game research. The use of psychophysiological measurements provides an objective, continuous, real-time, non-invasive, precise, and sensitive way to assess the game experience, but for best results it requires carefully controlled experiments, large participant samples and specialized equipment....