2,249 research outputs found

    From extinction learning to anxiety treatment: mind the gap

    Get PDF
    Laboratory models of extinction learning in animals and humans have the potential to illuminate methods for improving clinical treatment of fear-based clinical disorders. However, such translational research often neglects important differences between threat responses in animals and fear learning in humans, particularly as it relates to the treatment of clinical disorders. Specifically, the conscious experience of fear and anxiety, along with the capacity to deliberately engage top-down cognitive processes to modulate that experience, involves distinct brain circuitry and is measured and manipulated using different methods than typically used in laboratory research. This paper will identify how translational research that investigates methods of enhancing extinction learning can more effectively model such elements of human fear learning, and how doing so will enhance the relevance of this research to the treatment of fear-based psychological disorders.Published versio

    A Systematic Review of the Inter-individual Differences in Avoidance Learning

    Get PDF
    Avoidance is typically adaptive given it prevents threat. However, avoidance becomes maladaptive when it is executed out of proportion of threat (i.e., excessive or insufficient avoidance), persists in the absence of threat, or excessively generalizes to other innocuous situations. Although there has been an increase in research in these different processes of maladaptive avoidance, the role of inter-individual differences in these avoidance processes receives less research attention, despite its theoretical and clinical importance. In this systematic review, we summarized the role of inter-individual traits that relate to risk or resilient factors for anxiety-related disorders, trauma-and stressor-related disorders, obsessive-compulsive related disorders, pain related disorders, eating-related disorders, and affective disorders. A majority of the inter-individual differences had an apparent mixed or null effect on the different processes of avoidance. We discussed this lack of evidence of inter-individual differences on avoidance due to a lack of methodological and/or analytical consensus in the field, in addition to a lack of integration of recent findings into existing theories. Recommendations for future research are discussed, with a focus on examining the conditions or experimental parameters for certain inter-individual traits to manifest their effects on avoidance, identifying the nuances of methodological and/or inter-individual differences in avoidance, and a call for integrating recent preliminary findings into existing theories.</p

    An Augmented Reality system for the treatment of phobia to small animals viewed via an optical see-through HMD. Comparison with a similar system viewed via a video see-through

    Full text link
    This article presents an optical see-through (OST) Augmented Reality system for the treatment of phobia to small animals. The technical characteristics of the OST system are described, and a comparative study of the sense of presence and anxiety in a nonphobic population (24 participants) using the OST and an equivalent video see-though (VST) system is presented. The results indicate that if all participants are analyzed, the VST system induces greater sense of presence than the OST system. If the participants who had more fear are analyzed, the two systems induce a similar sense of presence. For the anxiety level, the two systems provoke similar and significant anxiety during the experiment. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.Juan, M.; Calatrava, J. (2011). An Augmented Reality system for the treatment of phobia to small animals viewed via an optical see-through HMD. Comparison with a similar system viewed via a video see-through. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 27(5):436-449. doi:10.1080/10447318.2011.552059S436449275Azuma, R. and Bishop, G. Improving static and dynamic registration in an optical see-through HMD. Proceedings of 21st Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive techniques (SIGGRAPH'94). pp.197–204.Bimber, O., & Raskar, R. (2005). Spatial Augmented Reality. doi:10.1201/b10624Botella, C., Quero, S., Banos, R. M., Garcia-Palacios, A., Breton-Lopez, J., Alcaniz, M., & Fabregat, S. (2008). Telepsychology and Self-Help: The Treatment of Phobias Using the Internet. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 11(6), 659-664. doi:10.1089/cpb.2008.0012Botella, C. M., Juan, M. C., Baños, R. M., Alcañiz, M., Guillén, V., & Rey, B. (2005). Mixing Realities? An Application of Augmented Reality for the Treatment of Cockroach Phobia. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 8(2), 162-171. doi:10.1089/cpb.2005.8.162Carlin, A. S., Hoffman, H. G., & Weghorst, S. (1997). Virtual reality and tactile augmentation in the treatment of spider phobia: a case report. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 35(2), 153-158. doi:10.1016/s0005-7967(96)00085-xGarcia-Palacios, A., Hoffman, H., Carlin, A., Furness, T. ., & Botella, C. (2002). Virtual reality in the treatment of spider phobia: a controlled study. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(9), 983-993. doi:10.1016/s0005-7967(01)00068-7Genc, Y., Tuceryan, M., & Navab, N. (s. f.). Practical solutions for calibration of optical see-through devices. Proceedings. International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. doi:10.1109/ismar.2002.1115086Hoffman, H. G., Garcia-Palacios, A., Carlin, A., Furness III, T. A., & Botella-Arbona, C. (2003). Interfaces That Heal: Coupling Real and Virtual Objects to Treat Spider Phobia. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 16(2), 283-300. doi:10.1207/s15327590ijhc1602_08Juan, M. C., Alcaniz, M., Monserrat, C., Botella, C., Banos, R. M., & Guerrero, B. (2005). Using Augmented Reality to Treat Phobias. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 25(6), 31-37. doi:10.1109/mcg.2005.143Juan, M. C., Baños, R., Botella, C., Pérez, D., Alcaníiz, M., & Monserrat, C. (2006). An Augmented Reality System for the Treatment of Acrophobia: The Sense of Presence Using Immersive Photography. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 15(4), 393-402. doi:10.1162/pres.15.4.393Kato, H., & Billinghurst, M. (s. f.). Marker tracking and HMD calibration for a video-based augmented reality conferencing system. Proceedings 2nd IEEE and ACM International Workshop on Augmented Reality (IWAR’99). doi:10.1109/iwar.1999.803809Nash, E. B., Edwards, G. W., Thompson, J. A., & Barfield, W. (2000). A Review of Presence and Performance in Virtual Environments. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 12(1), 1-41. doi:10.1207/s15327590ijhc1201_1Owen, C. B., Ji Zhou, Tang, A., & Fan Xiao. (s. f.). Display-Relative Calibration for Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays. Third IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. doi:10.1109/ismar.2004.28Özbek, C., Giesler, B. and Dillmann, R. Jedi training: Playful evaluation of head-mounted augmented reality display systems. SPIE Conference Medical Imaging. Vol. 5291, pp.454–463.Renaud, P., Bouchard, S., & Proulx, R. (2002). Behavioral avoidance dynamics in the presence of a virtual spider. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 6(3), 235-243. doi:10.1109/titb.2002.802381Schwald, B. and Laval, B. An Augmented Reality system for training and assistance to maintenance in the industrial context. International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision. pp.425–432.Slater, M., Usoh, M., & Steed, A. (1994). Depth of Presence in Virtual Environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 3(2), 130-144. doi:10.1162/pres.1994.3.2.130Szymanski, J., & O’Donohue, W. (1995). Fear of Spiders Questionnaire. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 26(1), 31-34. doi:10.1016/0005-7916(94)00072-

    From presence to consciousness through virtual reality

    Get PDF
    Immersive virtual environments can break the deep, everyday connection between where our senses tell us we are and where we are actually located and whom we are with. The concept of 'presence' refers to the phenomenon of behaving and feeling as if we are in the virtual world created by computer displays. In this article, we argue that presence is worthy of study by neuroscientists, and that it might aid the study of perception and consciousness

    A Review into eHealth Services and Therapies: Potential for Virtual Therapeutic Communities - Supporting People with Severe Personality Disorder

    Full text link
    eHealth has expanded hugely over the last fifteen years and continues to evolve, providing greater benefits for patients, health care professionals and providers alike. The technologies that support these systems have become increasingly more sophisticated and have progressed significantly from standard databases, used for patient records, to highly advanced Virtual Reality (VR) systems for the treatment of complex mental health illnesses. The scope of this paper is to initially explore e-Health, particularly in relation to technologies supporting the treatment and management of wellbeing in mental health. It then provides a case study of how technology in e-Health can lend itself to an application that could support and maintain the wellbeing of people with a severe mental illness. The case study uses Borderline Personality Disorder as an example, but could be applicable in many other areas, including depression, anxiety, addiction and PTSD. This type of application demonstrates how e-Health can empower the individuals using it but also potentially reducing the impact upon health care providers and services.Comment: Book chapte

    Assisting therapists in assessing small animal phobias by computer analysis of video-recorded sessions

    Get PDF
    Behavioural Avoidance Tests (BATs) are commonly used for assessing phobias. While easy to deploy, these tests have some practical difficulties. For instance, therapists have to make distance estimations that are hard to do with accuracy and objectivity; or information regarding the performance of the patients (e.g. their walking pattern) is lost. To alleviate these difficulties, a computerized tool has been developed to extract the walking pattern of patients while approaching the phobic stimulus. From a video-recorded BAT session, two visual representations have been explored to compactly summarize the patient’s behavior: a static one (an image) and a dynamic one (an animation). A proof-of-concept prototype has been tested with 23 therapists. Most of the therapists preferred the animated representation, since it provides them with a better sense of the dynamics of how the patient really behaved. The participants agreed that this tool might be useful in assisting therapist when assessing phobia through BATs, since diagnostics could be made in a more accurate and objective way.This work has been partly supported by Fundació Caixa-Castelló (through grant P1-1A2010-11) and Generalitat Valenciana (through grant PROMETEOII2014062)

    Height Simulation in a Virtual Reality CAVE System: Validity of Fear Responses and Effects of an Immersion Manipulation

    Get PDF
    Acrophobia is characterized by intense fear in height situations. Virtual reality (VR) can be used to trigger such phobic fear, and VR exposure therapy (VRET) has proven effective for treatment of phobias, although it remains important to further elucidate factors that modulate and mediate the fear responses triggered in VR. The present study assessed verbal and behavioral fear responses triggered by a height simulation in a 5-sided cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) with visual and acoustic simulation and further investigated how fear responses are modulated by immersion, i.e., an additional wind simulation, and presence, i.e., the feeling to be present in the VE. Results revealed a high validity for the CAVE and VE in provoking height related self-reported fear and avoidance behavior in accordance with a trait measure of acrophobic fear. Increasing immersion significantly increased fear responses in high height anxious (HHA) participants, but did not affect presence. Nevertheless, presence was found to be an important predictor of fear responses. We conclude that a CAVE system can be used to elicit valid fear responses, which might be further enhanced by immersion manipulations independent from presence. These results may help to improve VRET efficacy and its transfer to real situations

    Going for Growth; a Theoretical and Policy Framework

    Get PDF
    This paper introduces scenario planning as a tool to explore plausible developments for SMEs in the Netherlands until 2040. Globalization has resulted in the emergence of an increasingly borderless society with greater unrestricted movement of information, travel, and currency between countries. As policy and technological developments in the past few decades have spurred increases in cross-border trade, investment, and migration, new policy approaches in the economic, political, environmental, and social sphere will be necessary. On the national level, SMEs are acknowledged to play an important role in the economy serving as agent of change by their entrepreneurial activity, being the source of considerable innovative activity, stimulating industry evolution and creating an important share of the newly generated jobs. Entrepreneurship should therefore be promoted, but on a national level, since global development takes places in stages. Government policy, it is believed, can play a considerable role in facilitating entrepreneurship on a national scale. There is however great uncertainty on the scale of future bottlenecks and the economic conditions under which SMEs will need to develop. Scenarios can help map out possible changes and what effect they may have on national welfare.DYNREG
    corecore