Assessing the Potential of the Metaverse for Emotional Engagement and Cognitive Effort in Individuals With Depressive Symptoms

Depression continues to pose significant challenges for mental health care delivery, particularly due to barriers such as limited access to providers and stigma. Immersive virtual environments have recently emerged as a promising direction for enhancing user engagement in digital interventions. This paper explores whether a Metaverse-based setting can support emotional experiences and cognitive demands similar to those observed in physical environments.

An experimental study was conducted with 28 participants, divided based on depression severity and assigned to either a physical laboratory condition or a virtual environment implemented in Second Life. Participants completed an emotion induction task, and their responses were evaluated in terms of emotional intensity, perceived workload, and affective states using validated self-report measures.

The results indicate that the virtual and physical conditions produced comparable outcomes across most emotional and engagement measures. Notably, an interaction effect revealed that participants without depressive symptoms reported reduced perceived effort in the virtual environment.

These findings suggest that Metaverse-based systems can replicate key aspects of emotional experience while potentially lowering cognitive demand. This highlights their potential as scalable, user-centered platforms for designing more accessible and less demanding mental health interventions.