Investigating Dynamics of Subjective Anxiety and Behavior Due to Personal Space Violations and COVID-19-Related Stressors in a Social VR Simulation

Personal space is the physical distance individuals prefer to maintain from others, and its violation induces stress, anxiety, and behavioral change - a phenomenon intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. While prior research has largely relied on postexperiment questionnaires in passive, one-to-one scenarios, few studies have examined dynamic, crowd-based settings, and to our knowledge, none have collected time-resolved subjective anxiety aligned with moment-to-moment environmental stimuli. We introduce a novel social VR simulation that enables such dynamic analysis by combining continuous self-reports of anxiety with highresolution behavioral tracking during a two-stage, goal-oriented task. In Stage 1, participants navigated immersive VR environments (indoor/outdoor) while encountering virtual agents - some invading personal space, coughing, or (not) wearing masks. In Stage 2, they retrospectively annotated their experiences using first-person video playback. We also administered personality and COVID-related questionnaires. Across N=109 participants, we collected over 40,000 seconds of annotated data (≈ 374.56 s per person). Key findings include: 1) Personal space invasions significantly increased anxiety and movement, 2) Coughing agents elevated stress responses, while masks had no significant effect, and 3) Goal achievement consistently reduced anxiety, overriding other stressors. These results provide fine-grained insight into the temporal dynamics of emotional and behavioral responses to social stressors, and offer new design implications for social VR environments.