ARACHNE: an open multimodal dataset of physiological, behavioural, and subjective anxiety responses for spider phobia
Publication date
2026-06-08
Document type
Research data
Author
Organisational unit
Universität Siegen, Klinische Psychologie
Publisher
Zenodo
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Abstract
ARACHNE is an open multimodal dataset containing physiological, behavioural, and subjective anxiety responses collected during in vivo and virtual reality Behavioural Avoidance Tests (BATs) involving spider exposure. The dataset includes recordings from 23 participants and contains physiological data recorded with an Empatica E4 wristband, behavioural avoidance measures, and repeated subjective anxiety ratings.
The dataset is provided in both raw and preprocessed forms and is intended to support research in psychophysiology, anxiety disorders, virtual reality exposure, affective computing, and multimodal machine learning.
Detailed information regarding the study protocol, data structure, preprocessing procedures, and variable descriptions is provided in the accompanying documentation and associated publications.
The dataset is provided in both raw and preprocessed forms and is intended to support research in psychophysiology, anxiety disorders, virtual reality exposure, affective computing, and multimodal machine learning.
Detailed information regarding the study protocol, data structure, preprocessing procedures, and variable descriptions is provided in the accompanying documentation and associated publications.
Description
Project description:
ARACHNE is an open multimodal dataset containing physiological, behavioural, and subjective anxiety responses collected during in vivo and virtual reality Behavioural Avoidance Tests (BATs) involving spider exposure. The dataset was created to support research into the assessment of fear and anxiety responses, as well as the comparison of real-world and virtual reality exposure paradigms.
Behavioural Avoidance Tests are commonly used in clinical psychology to assess the severity of specific phobias by measuring an individual's willingness to approach a feared stimulus. In this dataset, participants were exposed to spiders in both a real-world and a virtual reality environment while physiological signals, behavioural measures, and subjective anxiety ratings were recorded. Behavioural measures include approach distance, BAT progression, and time spent at different stages of the avoidance task. Subjective anxiety was assessed repeatedly throughout the experiment using self-reported anxiety ratings.
The dataset enables the investigation of relationships between physiological arousal, behavioural avoidance, and subjective anxiety responses. It can be used for research in psychophysiology, anxiety disorders, exposure therapy, virtual reality applications, affective computing, and multimodal machine learning.
The study was performed with 25 participants. Due to hardware failures during data acquisition, complete physiological recordings were only available for 23 participants, and only these participants are included in the dataset.
Data Description:
The data is available in raw and preprocessed form.
The raw physiological data were recorded using an Empatica E4 wristband. For each participant, the following physiological files are provided:
• Accelerometer data for all three dimensions (ACC)
• Blood Volume Pulse (BVP)
• Electrodermal Activity (EDA)
• Heart Rate (HR)
• Interbeat Intervals (IBI)
• Temperature (TEMP).
In each file, the first line contains the Unix timestamp corresponding to the start of the recording, while the second line specifies the sampling frequency in Hz. All subsequent lines contain the recorded sensor values. To ensure participant anonymity, timestamps have been shifted such that the first measurement of each participant corresponds to a time of 0 seconds.
In addition to the physiological recordings, data describing participant behaviour and experiment progression are provided. The file Anxiety contains all subjective anxiety ratings recorded during the experiment on a scale from 0 to 100. The file Distance contains the distance between the participant and the spider at predefined checkpoints, measured in centimetres. The file Steps contains timestamps indicating the start and end of the individual experimental phases, including questionnaire periods and the various Behavioural Avoidance Tests (BATs). Finally, the files TableBAT and WalkBAT contain time-resolved measurements of participant distance and subjective anxiety during the virtual reality BATs.
For the preprocessed data, one file is available per participant and includes:
• Time, in seconds since the start of the experiment
• Temperature, in °C
• Heart Rate Variability (RMSSD and SDNN, in ms)
• Anxiety, measured on a scale from 0 to 100
• Distance, in cm
• Heart Rate in bpm
• Experiment, indicating the current phase of the experiment, encoded so that 0 = VR Tutorial, 1 = Questionnaire, 2 = Table BAT, 3 = VR Table BAT, 4 = Walk BAT, 5 = VR Walk BAT, 6 = Other / Between Phases
• isBAT, 1 if the current phase is a BAT, otherwise 0
• isVR, 1 if the current phase is a BAT in virtual reality, otherwise 0
• isWalk, 1 if the current phase is a walk BAT, otherwise 0
• TargetDistance indicates the final distance between the participant and the spider. During periods outside an active experiment phase, this value is set to 300 cm
• Electrodermal activity (EDA), decomposed into tonic and phasic components (EDA_Tonic and EDA_Phasic)
• Participant ID.
All variables are synchronised to a common timeline. To facilitate multimodal analysis, signals recorded at lower sampling frequencies are upsampled and interpolated to a common sampling frequency of 4 Hz.
Together, these files provide physiological, behavioural, and subjective measures of fear and anxiety responses during both real-world and virtual reality spider exposure.
Further information:
Further description of the study can be found in the following paper: Schmuecker, Vanessa, et al. "Behavioral avoidance test: Comparison between in vivo and virtual reality using questionnaires and psychophysiology." 2022 IEEE International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR). IEEE, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1109/AIVR56993.2022.00036
Further description of the preprocessing can be found in this paper: Grensing, Florian, et al. "ReBAT: Regression-Based Anxiety Recognition during Behavioural Avoidance Tasks." BIO Web of Conferences. Vol. 195. EDP Sciences, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1051/bioconf/202519501002
Ethics:
The research related to human use complies with all the relevant national regulations, institutional policies and was performed in accordance with the tenets of the Helsinki Declaration, and has been approved by the ethics commission of the University of Siegen,
Germany, reference number: ER_04_2023 Only anonymized data are included in this dataset.
The data is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 - CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode)
ARACHNE is an open multimodal dataset containing physiological, behavioural, and subjective anxiety responses collected during in vivo and virtual reality Behavioural Avoidance Tests (BATs) involving spider exposure. The dataset was created to support research into the assessment of fear and anxiety responses, as well as the comparison of real-world and virtual reality exposure paradigms.
Behavioural Avoidance Tests are commonly used in clinical psychology to assess the severity of specific phobias by measuring an individual's willingness to approach a feared stimulus. In this dataset, participants were exposed to spiders in both a real-world and a virtual reality environment while physiological signals, behavioural measures, and subjective anxiety ratings were recorded. Behavioural measures include approach distance, BAT progression, and time spent at different stages of the avoidance task. Subjective anxiety was assessed repeatedly throughout the experiment using self-reported anxiety ratings.
The dataset enables the investigation of relationships between physiological arousal, behavioural avoidance, and subjective anxiety responses. It can be used for research in psychophysiology, anxiety disorders, exposure therapy, virtual reality applications, affective computing, and multimodal machine learning.
The study was performed with 25 participants. Due to hardware failures during data acquisition, complete physiological recordings were only available for 23 participants, and only these participants are included in the dataset.
Data Description:
The data is available in raw and preprocessed form.
The raw physiological data were recorded using an Empatica E4 wristband. For each participant, the following physiological files are provided:
• Accelerometer data for all three dimensions (ACC)
• Blood Volume Pulse (BVP)
• Electrodermal Activity (EDA)
• Heart Rate (HR)
• Interbeat Intervals (IBI)
• Temperature (TEMP).
In each file, the first line contains the Unix timestamp corresponding to the start of the recording, while the second line specifies the sampling frequency in Hz. All subsequent lines contain the recorded sensor values. To ensure participant anonymity, timestamps have been shifted such that the first measurement of each participant corresponds to a time of 0 seconds.
In addition to the physiological recordings, data describing participant behaviour and experiment progression are provided. The file Anxiety contains all subjective anxiety ratings recorded during the experiment on a scale from 0 to 100. The file Distance contains the distance between the participant and the spider at predefined checkpoints, measured in centimetres. The file Steps contains timestamps indicating the start and end of the individual experimental phases, including questionnaire periods and the various Behavioural Avoidance Tests (BATs). Finally, the files TableBAT and WalkBAT contain time-resolved measurements of participant distance and subjective anxiety during the virtual reality BATs.
For the preprocessed data, one file is available per participant and includes:
• Time, in seconds since the start of the experiment
• Temperature, in °C
• Heart Rate Variability (RMSSD and SDNN, in ms)
• Anxiety, measured on a scale from 0 to 100
• Distance, in cm
• Heart Rate in bpm
• Experiment, indicating the current phase of the experiment, encoded so that 0 = VR Tutorial, 1 = Questionnaire, 2 = Table BAT, 3 = VR Table BAT, 4 = Walk BAT, 5 = VR Walk BAT, 6 = Other / Between Phases
• isBAT, 1 if the current phase is a BAT, otherwise 0
• isVR, 1 if the current phase is a BAT in virtual reality, otherwise 0
• isWalk, 1 if the current phase is a walk BAT, otherwise 0
• TargetDistance indicates the final distance between the participant and the spider. During periods outside an active experiment phase, this value is set to 300 cm
• Electrodermal activity (EDA), decomposed into tonic and phasic components (EDA_Tonic and EDA_Phasic)
• Participant ID.
All variables are synchronised to a common timeline. To facilitate multimodal analysis, signals recorded at lower sampling frequencies are upsampled and interpolated to a common sampling frequency of 4 Hz.
Together, these files provide physiological, behavioural, and subjective measures of fear and anxiety responses during both real-world and virtual reality spider exposure.
Further information:
Further description of the study can be found in the following paper: Schmuecker, Vanessa, et al. "Behavioral avoidance test: Comparison between in vivo and virtual reality using questionnaires and psychophysiology." 2022 IEEE International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR). IEEE, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1109/AIVR56993.2022.00036
Further description of the preprocessing can be found in this paper: Grensing, Florian, et al. "ReBAT: Regression-Based Anxiety Recognition during Behavioural Avoidance Tasks." BIO Web of Conferences. Vol. 195. EDP Sciences, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1051/bioconf/202519501002
Ethics:
The research related to human use complies with all the relevant national regulations, institutional policies and was performed in accordance with the tenets of the Helsinki Declaration, and has been approved by the ethics commission of the University of Siegen,
Germany, reference number: ER_04_2023 Only anonymized data are included in this dataset.
The data is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 - CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode)
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