thesis
Anxiety activating virtual environments for investigating social phobias
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Abstract
Social phobia has become one of the commonest manifestations of fear in any
society. This fear is often accompanied by major depression or social disabilities.
With the awareness that fear can be aggravated in social situations, virtual reality
researchers and psychologists have investigated the feasibility of a virtual reality
system as a psychotherapeutic intervention to combat social phobia. Virtual
reality technology has rapidly improved over the past few years, making for better
interactions. Nevertheless, the field of virtual reality exposure therapy for social
phobia is still in its infancy and various issues have yet to be resolved or event
uncovered.
The key concept of virtual reality exposure therapy in the treatment of social
phobia is based on its characteristic of perceptual illusion - the sense of presence
- as an anxiety-activating system, instead of conventional imaginal or in-vivo exposure techniques. Therefore, in order to provoke a significant level of anxiety in
virtual environments, it is very important to understand the impact of perceptual
presence factors in virtual reality exposure therapy. Hence, this research mainly
aims to investigate all the aspects of the correlation between anxiety and the components of the virtual environment in a computer-generated social simulation. By
understanding this, this thesis aims to provide a framework for the construction
of effective virtual reality exposure therapy for social phobia care which enables
anxiety stimuli to be controlled in a gradual manner as a conventional clinical
approach.
This thesis presents a series of experimental studies that have been conducted
with a common theme: the function of 3D inhabitants and visual apparatus in
anxiety-activating virtual social simulation, a job-interview. However, each study
is conducted using different research objectives. The experimental results are
presented in this thesis, with psycho-physiological approach, revealing a variation
of the distribution of participants' anxiety states across various VR conditions.
The overall conclusion of this research is that an appropriate realism of VR stimuli
is essential in sustaining the state of anxiety over the course of VR exposure. The
high fidelity of virtual environment generally provoke a greater degree of anxiety,
but this research also shows that aspects of VR fidelity is more related to the
mental representation of individuals to the context of the stressful situation rather
than any technology that is being used