Playing the Role of a Nurse in a Virtual Reality Simulation: A Safe Environment for Emotion Management

Background: Nurses' successful emotional coping with unpleasant emotions triggered by intense clinical situations is associated with better-quality patient care. Nursing students experience significant challenges with managing their emotions in clinical practice. Purpose: To evaluate a virtual reality (VR)-based simulation as a platform for emotional management training. Methods: A pretest-posttest research design was used to study sophomore nursing students (n = 75) while learning with a VR simulation. Results: Playing the role of a nurse in a VR hospital triggered an emotional dissonance to uncover students' management strategies, specifically deep cognitive acting and surface acting strategies. Surface acting emphasizes emotions that are displayed but not genuinely experienced and was negatively associated with posttest knowledge scores (r =-0.34, P <.05). Conclusion: Learning with VR can provide a safe environment both for acquiring knowledge and for revealing students' emotional management, which, in turn, can be leveraged by educators to redirect the emotion work required in the nursing profession.