Dataset for "Do Virtual Spiders Feel Real? Dissociation Between Subjective and Physiological Fear During Virtual Reality Exposure"

This dataset accompanies the study "Do Virtual Spiders Feel Real? Dissociation Between Subjective and Physiological Fear During Virtual Reality Exposure." It contains data collected during a virtual reality (VR) exposure experiment investigating the relationship between subjective fear responses and physiological indicators of stress elicited by spider-related stimuli. The archive consists of individual participant recordings (pXX.csv), where each file corresponds to a single participant and contains time-series data acquired during the VR session. These recordings include raw physiological signals (PPG, respiratory signal, EDA), heart rate obtained from a smartwatch, information about spiders visible in the virtual scene, and telemetry data from the VR headset, including position and orientation. A detailed description of the variables contained in these files is provided in pX_description.txt. The file summary.csv contains participant-level information, including demographic characteristics, questionnaire scores, subjective anxiety ratings, salivary cortisol measurements, and physiological features derived from the individual recordings. These derived measures include heart rate, heart rate variability indices, respiratory rate, electrodermal activity, and agreement metrics between heart rate obtained from PPG and smartwatch measurements. A description of all variables in summary.csv is provided in summary_description.txt. Files included in the archive: pXX.csv – individual participant recordings from the VR experiment containing raw sensor data and VR telemetry; pX_description.txt – description of variables contained in the pXX.csv files; summary.csv – participant-level dataset containing demographics, questionnaire scores, subjective ratings, cortisol measurements, and derived physiological features; summary_description.txt – description of variables contained in summary.csv. Participant identifiers are pseudonymized. The dataset is intended to support reproducibility and secondary analyses of the relationship between subjective and physiological responses during VR exposure to spiders.