The theoretical backbone of the work is the Social Identity Approach, a long-standing framework in social psychology which holds that people can perceive themselves at different levels: as unique individuals or as members of a group. Which level is salient at any moment changes how information from the environment is processed. A player who identifies strongly with the team treats what benefits the group as benefiting the self, and prior research has repeatedly linked higher social identity to more pleasant affective states in athletes. Because emotions in sport are deeply tied to these self-categorisation processes, the authors argue that coaching staff need tools to help athletes manage identity-driven emotional fluctuations — and that virtual reality, with its capacity to recreate emotionally charged game contexts on demand, is an ideal laboratory for doing so.

Recreating one of rugby’s most emotionally loaded moments was the team’s central design challenge. They chose the try. Forty male professional and aspiring professional players from three French clubs, with an average age of about 21, were fitted with an HTC Vive Pro head-mounted display and five body trackers — one on each hand, one on each foot and one below the navel — so that their real movements drove their virtual body in real time. The virtual environment, built in Unity3D, reproduced the Stade de France, complete with a giant screen, customised club colours and flags, and a crowd whose chants and songs were mixed from real recordings, including footage captured at a 2021 Autumn Nations Series match in Bordeaux. The congratulatory voices of the virtual teammates were recorded by researchers using a script written with an actual rugby player, so that the shouts echoing across the pitch matched what players genuinely say after a score.

Before anything happened, each participant went through an embodiment phase. Standing alone on an empty virtual pitch, they watched their avatar — a generic rugby player model whose skin colour had been matched to their own — reflected in a virtual mirror while moving their arms and legs. This visuo-motor synchrony is a well-established trigger for the body ownership illusion, the sensation that a virtual body is one’s own, which arises from the brain’s multisensory integration of visual and motor signals. Previous work shows that once people experience ownership over an avatar, they accept it as a partial representation of themselves even when it does not resemble them. Only after this foundation was laid did the experiment proper begin: participants were told they had just scored, and the two-minute try scene unfolded around them.

The experiment used a within-subjects design, so every player experienced both conditions. In the collective condition, the stadium announcer declared that the player’s team had scored, supporters held signs reading “GO” followed by the team’s name, a replay of the try played on the giant screen beneath the club logo, and virtual teammates sprinted in to celebrate before forming a huddle at centre field while the captain delivered a motivational speech. In the individual condition, the announcer named the player personally, supporters waved signs with his own name, his photo replaced the team logo on the big screen, and his teammates — dressed in neutral colours — ignored him entirely. The question was whether these carefully engineered social cues could steer the players’ sense of self in opposite directions.

Measuring the answer without destroying the illusion required a genuine technical innovation. Traditionally, presence and embodiment are assessed with questionnaires filled in after immersion, forcing participants to reconstruct fading memories. Asking questions mid-immersion, meanwhile, risks shattering presence the moment a floating questionnaire appears. The team’s solution was the “transparent bubble”: when a measurement was needed, the surrounding environment darkened, ambient sounds were toned down and the depth of field shifted, giving players the impression of being inside a soap bubble. A two-metre-long visual analogue scale, or a 9-by-9 affect grid adapted from Russell’s classic measure, materialised sixty centimetres in front of them at chest height, and they moved a yellow cursor with their virtual hand. Identity was probed with three instruments: a scalar scale for social identity (“I feel like a member of my team”), a scalar scale for personal identity, and a bipolar scale forcing a trade-off between the two.

The results were strikingly one-sided. In the collective condition, social identity rose by roughly 14 percent, from a mean of 73.1 to 83.1 on the 0-to-100 scale, while personal identity fell by nearly 30 percent, from 45.3 to 31.9. The bipolar identity scale swung toward the group by about 24 percent. Affective valence climbed from 77.3 to 87.5 and arousal from 64.6 to 79.5, both statistically significant. In the individual condition, by contrast, none of these variables changed significantly — personal identity did not rise, arousal did not budge, and pleasant affect stayed flat. Linear mixed-effects models confirmed that neither rugby expertise nor prior VR experience explained these shifts, ruling out the possibility that only VR-savvy or less elite players were susceptible.

The immersion metrics added an unexpected twist. Place illusion — the sensation of genuinely being on the pitch — increased significantly in the collective condition, from 69.8 to 80.3, and co-presence, the feeling of sharing the field with one’s teammates, was far higher there (a mean of 80.3) than in the individual condition (59.3). The authors interpret this through the lens of predictive processing: the virtual teammates behaved exactly as real teammates would, matching the players’ learned expectations of post-try rituals, and the synchronised human voices seemed to confirm that the space was genuinely shared with other agents. Intriguingly, professional players reported lower body ownership and place illusion than aspiring professionals, which the authors suggest may reflect experts’ heightened body awareness and sharper sensitivity to discrepancies between the simulation and the real stadiums they know intimately.

Perhaps the most conceptually important finding concerns how the two identity levels relate. In the collective condition they moved in opposite directions, consistent with classical self-categorisation theory, yet across conditions they behaved largely independently — social identity remained high even when the scene was engineered to spotlight the individual. The authors conclude that it is changes in social identity, not personal identity, that primarily drive athletes’ psychological experience in team sports, and that the failure of the individual condition suggests “being alone” is simply the absence of social cues rather than their symmetrical opposite. The study’s identity measures, while grounded in the literature, have not yet undergone full psychometric validation, and the authors call for physiological measures such as heart rate and electrodermal activity, gaze tracking, and cybersickness controls in future work.

Even with those caveats, the implications reach well beyond rugby. The transparent bubble technique offers social scientists a way to collect in-the-moment subjective data without ejecting participants from the very experience being measured — a meaningful advance for VR methodology across psychology. For practitioners, the study sketches a realistic path toward mental training programmes in which coaches and sport psychologists can dial specific identity cues up or down, recreating the emotional texture of a roaring stadium on a Tuesday afternoon. If emotions in team sport flow through identity, this experiment shows the tap can now, at least in part, be turned by design.

Subject of Research: Inducing and measuring social and personal identity in professional rugby players using immersive virtual reality

Article Title: Inducing and measuring identity levels in professional rugby players during immersion in an interactive virtual environment

Article References: Neyret, S., Pellet, J., Ryard, J., Campo, M., & Chardonnet, J.-R. (2026). Inducing and measuring identity levels in professional rugby players during immersion in an interactive virtual environment. PLOS One, 21(10), e0359964. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359964

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0359964

Keywords: virtual reality, social identity, rugby, sport psychology, embodiment, presence, co-presence, affect, body ownership illusion, mental training, team sports, visual analogue scales

The scale of head impact exposure in rugby is striking. Previous research has estimated that players experience an average of 14 to 52 significant head impacts per game, and the sport records high numbers of traumatic brain injuries. What makes the new work particularly important is its focus on youth athletes, a population that has been largely overlooked in head impact research. Even without a diagnosed concussion, repeated exposure to head acceleration events has been linked to both physical and mental health problems, making the accumulation of sub-concussive impacts a serious concern for adolescent players whose brains are still developing.

To capture the data, the team worked with three club rugby union teams from Christchurch: two male under-16 squads and one female under-17 squad. Each player underwent a preseason dental scan so that custom-fitted HitIQ Nexus A9 instrumented mouthguards could be manufactured from digital impressions. These devices packed a Bosch gyroscope and three triaxial accelerometers, sampling linear motion at 1600 hertz and rotational motion at 3200 hertz. Independent laboratory validation showed the mouthguards tracked peak linear and rotational accelerations with extraordinary fidelity, achieving coefficients of determination of 0.996 and 0.994 respectively. Events below 8 g of linear acceleration were excluded in line with World Rugby standards, and every recorded head acceleration event was verified against synchronized video footage before being included in the analysis.

The dataset was substantial: 1552 video-verified head acceleration events from male players and 647 from female players in the 2022 season, plus another 925 male events in 2023. Each event was meticulously labelled with details drawn from the video, including the impact surface involved, the location on the head, the player’s motion at the time, the match action, and, for tackles, the position of the tackler’s head and the contact point on the ball carrier’s body. The researchers then built sixteen separate linear mixed-effect models, one for each combination of four research questions and four kinematic metrics: peak linear acceleration, peak rotational acceleration, and the head injury criterion and rotational injury criterion, which capture the shape of the acceleration trace over short time windows.

The clearest pattern to emerge concerned the type of impact. Head impacts against bony body regions, such as another player’s head, knee, boot, or elbow, produced the highest linear and rotational acceleration metrics of any impact category. Crushing impacts, where a player’s head was forced into the ground, and straightforward head-to-ground impacts followed close behind. Perhaps surprisingly, impacts between the head and the ball generated higher rotational accelerations than impacts with the hip or soft body regions like arms and torsos. At the other end of the spectrum, indirect head acceleration events, where the head is whipped around without direct contact, and head impacts with tackle pads produced the lowest acceleration metrics of all.

Impact location on the head itself proved equally revealing. Impacts to the chin produced the highest peak accelerations of any location, followed by impacts to the rear of the head, while blows to the front, top, or side resulted in the lowest metrics. The researchers offer a biomechanical explanation for the chin’s vulnerability: the chin sits far from both the neck musculature and the head’s centre of mass, so a given impact force there exerts greater rotational motion on the head. They also note a possible measurement artefact, since an impact near the chin may often contact the upper jaw where the mouthguard sits, transferring acceleration more directly to the sensors.

Sex differences appeared in unexpected places. Across the full dataset, male players showed higher peak linear accelerations than females, yet no sex difference emerged for rotational metrics. However, when the interaction between sex and match action was examined, males displayed significantly lower acceleration metrics during training drills, mauls, and scrums than their female counterparts. When only direct head impacts were considered, males again showed higher peak linear and rotational accelerations. The authors suggest these patterns may reflect differences in gameplay style between male and female teams, or possibly differences in body composition, coaching approach, or neck strength relative to head mass, though the observational design of the study means the underlying causes remain unexplored.

One of the study’s more counterintuitive findings concerned tackling technique. Previous simulation studies had suggested that tackle height and technique strongly influence head kinematics, with upper-body tackles producing far greater accelerations for the ball carrier. Yet in this real-world youth cohort, the tackler’s head position had no significant effect on any acceleration metric, and tackle location only significantly affected the head injury criterion. The exception came from the interaction between the two: tackles made to the torso or hip region and to the upper leg, with the tackler’s head beside the contact point, produced the highest peak accelerations. The authors caution that overlapping tackle categories and sparse data may have muted relationships that more detailed tackle analysis could reveal.

For indirect head acceleration events, the direction of head motion mattered greatly. Events producing flexion and extension, the forward-and-backward whipping of the head, or lateral flexion, side-to-side motion, induced the highest linear and rotational accelerations, while events where players were simply stabilising themselves produced the lowest. This finding carries practical weight because indirect impacts account for roughly half of all head acceleration events, meaning that protective headgear, which only addresses direct contact, can never tackle the full problem on its own.

The researchers are careful to frame their results as hypothesis-generating rather than clinically definitive. Peak head kinematics and injury metrics indicate impact severity but do not, in isolation, predict concussion risk, and the interpretation of injury criteria in youth populations remains uncertain. The team also acknowledges limitations, including sparse data for some impact categories, the exclusion of ball-carrier tackle analysis due to insufficient data, and the absence of false-discovery corrections, which the authors judged ill-suited to their exploratory modelling with unbalanced subgroups. Still, the message is clear and actionable: the severity of head impacts in youth rugby is tightly linked to how the game is played, and modifying gameplay conditions, training, and technique may reduce head impact exposure without relying on additional protective equipment. Identifying which specific events warrant intervention, the authors argue, is the essential first step toward making the sport safer for the next generation of players.

Subject of Research: Head impact kinematics and gameplay conditions in youth rugby union

Article Title: A Mixed Effect Analysis of Head Impact Accelerations During Rugby Head Impacts Under Different Gameplay Conditions

Article References: Stitt, D., Spriggs, N., Henley, S., Alexander, K., Draper, N., & Kabaliuk, N. (2026). A Mixed Effect Analysis of Head Impact Accelerations During Rugby Head Impacts Under Different Gameplay Conditions. Annals of Biomedical Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-026-04225-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10439-026-04225-3

Keywords: rugby, concussion, head impact, instrumented mouthguard, youth sport, biomechanics, linear acceleration, rotational acceleration, head injury criterion, tackle technique, sex differences, player safety