Negative Emotion, Positive Effect? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Fear on User Satisfaction in Immersive Virtual Reality Sports

Abstract This study examined whether users’ negative emotions of fear could be positively associated with their satisfaction with immersive virtual reality (VR) sports and how exercise intensity modes of VR sports moderate this relationship at the individual leisure player level. The proposed hypotheses were examined using user-generated reviews (N = 57,047) generated by individual leisure players about their VR sports usage experiences, collected from the Meta Oculus platform. Sentiment analysis and fixed-effects ordered logistic regression were applied to test the hypotheses. The results show that fear affects user satisfaction positively, and exercise intensity modes of VR sports moderate the positive effect. This suggests that incorporating elements designed to evoke users’ negative emotions of fear within VR sports can contribute to enhanced user satisfaction under certain conditions (such as exercise intensity). The findings also provide practical guidelines for VR sports practitioners to improve immersive VR sports design.