The sense of presence - the feeling of 'being there' in an environment - is a foundational concept in consciousness research, yet its relationship to human affect remains theoretically underdeveloped. Although presence and emotion are known to interact, prior accounts have treated this relationship as either unidirectional or have failed to specify which aspects of affect interact with which...
The sense of presence is typically defined as the feeling of "being there" in a virtual environment, whereas the sense of reality is defined as the ability to discriminate between real and unreal phenomena. We challenge this rigid dichotomy, arguing that presence and reality can be considered conceptually, mechanistically, and phenomenologically continuous. We first demonstrate that both...