Figure 1
General experimental design and procedures. After the announcement of the presence or absence of distressing screams, the passive walkthrough 1 begun. The tracking shot started in the hallway and entered the rooms in ascending order (1–4). In each room the camera positioned itself at three locations in ascending order (marked by the circled numbers 1–3). Before the camera entered a new room, it returned to the starting point in the hallway. The red dot indicates the position of the person stimuli in the room. The person stimuli were either standing between the couch and the dresser or sitting on the couch. Apart from the person stimuli, all rooms were arranged identically. The rightmost picture depicts an exemplary room. After walkthrough 1 the participants were asked to rate their anxiety, stress and emotional arousal on a 9-point Likert scale and to estimate the length of the walkthrough. This process was repeated for walkthrough 2, which was similar to walkthrough 1, but differed in terms of the position of the person stimuli in the rooms and the route of the tracking shot. After the walkthroughs, the subjects engaged in a distraction task. After the distraction task, the subjects were asked to perform a memory recall and recognition test.
