Irene Alice Chicchi Giglioli

Augmented Reality: A Brand New Challenge for the Assessment and Treatment of Psychological Disorders

Augmented Reality is a new technological system that allows introducing virtual contents in the real world in order to run in the same representation and, in real time, enhancing the users sensory perception of reality. From another point of view, Augmented Reality can be defined as a set of techniques and tools that add information to the physical reality. To date, Augmented Reality has been used in many fields, such as medicine, entertainment, maintenance, architecture, education, and cognitive and motor rehabilitation but very few studies and applications of AR exist in clinical psychology. In the treatment of psychological disorders, Augmented Reality has given preliminary evidence to be a useful tool due to its adaptability to the patient needs and therapeutic purposes and interactivity. Another relevant factor is the quality of the users experience in the Augmented Reality system determined from emotional engagement and sense of presence. This experience could increase the AR ecological validity in the treatment of psychological disorders. This paper reviews the recent studies on the use of Augmented Reality in the evaluation and treatment of psychological disorders, focusing on current uses of this technology and on the specific features that delineate Augmented Reality a new technique useful for psychology.

Testing Augmented Reality for Cue Exposure in Obese Patients: An Exploratory Study

Binge eating is one of the key behaviors in relation to the etiology and severity of obesity. Cue exposure with response prevention consists of exposing patients to binge foods while actual eating is not allowed. Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to change the way cue exposure is administered, but very few prior studies have been conducted so far. Starting from these premises, this study was aimed to (a) investigate whether AR foods elicit emotional responses comparable to those produced by the real stimuli, (b) study differences between obese and control participants in terms of emotional responses to food, and (c) compare emotional responses to different categories of foods. To reach these goals, we assess in 15 obese (age, 44.6 ± 13 years; body mass index [BMI], 44.2 ± 8.1) and 15 control participants (age, 43.7 ± 12.8 years; BMI, 21.2 ± 1.4) the emotional responses to high-calorie (savory and sweet) and low-calorie food stimuli, presented through different exposure conditions (real, photographic, and AR). The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was used for the assessment of state anxiety, and it was administered at the beginning and after the exposure to foods, along with the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) for Hunger and Happiness. To assess the perceived pleasantness, the VAS for Palatability was administered after the exposure to food stimuli. Heart rate, skin conductance response, and facial corrugator supercilii muscle activation were recorded. Although preliminary, the results showed that (a) AR food stimuli were perceived to be as palatable as real stimuli, and they also triggered a similar arousal response; (b) obese individuals showed lower happiness after the exposure to food compared to control participants, with regard to both psychological and physiological responses; and (c) high-calorie savory (vs. low-calorie) food stimuli were perceived by all the participants to be more palatable, and they triggered a greater arousal response.

Low-Cost Motion-Tracking for Computational Psychometrics Based on Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer-based simulation designed to expose users to environments in order to replicate real world objects and events. In this framework, video games are one of the most popular forms of VR media all over the worlds. Their popularity has been fuelled by advancements in gaming technology and interactive devices at a low cost in home gaming market but also in clinical and research settings. In clinical and research virtual rehabilitation, the user should be able to interact (directly or indirectly) with the environment via a wide array of input technologies. These include activation of computer keyboard keys, a mouse or a joypad (indirect) and even by using special sensors or visual tracking (direct). For example, Microsoft Kinect provides low-cost motion tracking sensors, allowing to clinicians to interact with rehabilitation applications in the most natural and flexible way. This flexibility can be employed to tailor the user interaction to the specific rehabilitation user aims. According to this perspective, the paper aims to present a potential new platform, NeuroVirtual3D, which intends to develop a software interface for supporting assessment and rehabilitation of cognition function through several input/output devices, such as data gloves, joypad and Microsoft Kinect.

A Novel Integrating Virtual Reality Approach for the Assessment of the Attachment Behavioral System

Virtual reality (VR) technology represents a novel and powerful tool for behavioral research in psychological assessment. VR provides simulated experiences able to create the sensation of undergoing real situations. Users become active participants in the virtual environment seeing, hearing, feeling, and actuating as if they were in the real world. Currently, the most psychological VR applications concern the treatment of various mental disorders but not the assessment, that it is mainly based on paper and pencil tests. The observation of behaviors is costly, labor-intensive, and it is hard to create social situations in laboratory settings, even if the observation of actual behaviors could be particularly informative. In this framework, social stressful experiences can activate various behaviors of attachment for a significant person that can help to control and soothe them to promote individual’s well-being. Social support seeking, physical proximity, and positive and negative behaviors represent the main attachment behaviors that people can carry out during experiences of distress. We proposed VR as a novel integrating approach to measure real attachment behaviors. The first studies on attachment behavioral system by VR showed the potentiality of this approach. To improve the assessment during the VR experience, we proposed virtual stealth assessment (VSA) as a new method. VSA could represent a valid and novel technique to measure various psychological attributes in real-time during the virtual experience. The possible use of this method in psychology could be to generate a more complete, exhaustive, and accurate individual’s psychological evaluation.

Feeling Ghost Food as Real One: Psychometric Assessment of Presence Engagement Exposing to Food in Augmented Reality

In the last decade, the use of technology is considerably increased. A propriety that makes technologies effective tools is to elicit high levels of sense of presence similar to real one experience. Augmented Reality is a new paradigm involving virtual elements in the real world enriching reality with valuables information. This study investigated the flux of the sense of presence and the state anxiety to food stimuli exposure across reality, pictures, and Augmented Reality in twenty-two healthy subjects. The results showed that subjects were clearly able to distinguish the three types of domains, reporting high levels of presence engagement both in reality and Augmented Reality condition. Furthermore, all food stimuli were able to relax subjects, regardless the exposure condition.

Individuals’ Variables in Cognitive Abilities Using a Narrative Serious Game

Age, gender, and education represent crucial variables in the assessment and interpretation of traditional neuropsychological measures as regards the executive functions (EF). Currently, traditional measures are showing limitations in capturing real life behaviors and new technologies, such as serious games, are allowing creating more real situations with higher ecological validity. In the present study, we applied a serious game approach to investigate individual variables-related differences in the EF assessment. 268 healthy subjects participated in the study, completing 14 tasks (6 standard tasks; 8 serious games) randomly presented. The results showed that younger participants completed tasks in less time than older and with higher correct answers. Furthermore, males registered shorter reaction times, while females showed higher percentages of correct answers. The university studies group obtained higher total score and correct answers than high school studies group. Finally, since the study involved technology, we divided the group in high and low use technology level, obtaining that participants with a lower level of use technologies reported higher latency times and lower correct answers in high order EF tasks than the group with higher level of use of technology. As the traditional measure, these findings suggest that individuals’ differences are critical variables to consider in the development of more ecological measures for the assessment of EFs.

The Past, Present, and Future of Virtual and Augmented Reality Research: A network and cluster analysis of the literature

The recent appearance of low cost virtual reality (VR) technologies – like the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and the Sony PlayStation VR – and Mixed Reality Interfaces (MRITF) – like the Hololens – is attracting the attention of users and researchers suggesting it may be the next largest stepping stone in technological innovation. However, the history of VR technology is longer than it may seem: the concept of VR was formulated in the 1960s and the first commercial VR tools appeared in the late 1980s. For this reason, during the last 20 years, 100s of researchers explored the processes, effects, and applications of this technology producing 1000s of scientific papers. What is the outcome of this significant research work? This paper wants to provide an answer to this question by exploring, using advanced scientometric techniques, the existing research corpus in the field. We collected all the existent articles about VR in the Web of Science Core Collection scientific database, and the resultant dataset contained 21,667 records for VR and 9,944 for augmented reality (AR). The bibliographic record contained various fields, such as author, title, abstract, country, and all the references (needed for the citation analysis). The network and cluster analysis of the literature showed a composite panorama characterized by changes and evolutions over the time. Indeed, whether until 5 years ago, the main publication media on VR concerned both conference proceeding and journals, more recently journals constitute the main medium of communication. Similarly, if at first computer science was the leading research field, nowadays clinical areas have increased, as well as the number of countries involved in VR research. The present work discusses the evolution and changes over the time of the use of VR in the main areas of application with an emphasis on the future expected VR’s capacities, increases and challenges. We conclude considering the disruptive contribution that VR/AR/MRITF will be able to get in scientific fields, as well in human communication and interaction, as already happened with the advent of mobile phones by increasing the use and the development of scientific applications (e.g., in clinical areas) and by modifying the social communication and interaction among people.

Virtual Reality as an Emerging Methodology for Leadership Assessment and Training

In developed countries, companies are now substantially reliant on the skills and abilities of their leaders to tackle a variety of complex issues. There is a growing consensus that leadership development training and assessment methods should adopt more holistic methodologies, including those associated with the emotional and neuroendocrine aspects of learning. Recent research into the assessment of leadership competencies has proposed the use of objective methods and measurements based on neuroscience. One of the challenges to be faced in the development of a performance-based methodology to measure leadership skills is how to generate real-life situations with triggers that allow us to study management competencies under controlled laboratory conditions. A way to address this question is to take advantage of virtual environments to recreate real-life situations that might arise in performance-based assessments. We propose virtual reality (VR) as a very promising tool to observe various leadership related behavioral patterns during dynamic, complex and realistic situations. By seamlessly embedding assessment methods into virtual learning environments, VR can provide objective assessment methods with high ecological validity. VR also holds unlimited opportunities for leadership training providing subjects with intelligent tutoring systems that adapts situations in real time according to the observed behaviors.

Virtual Stealth Assessment: A New Methodological Approach for Assessing Psychological Needs

In the past decade, the use of technology is extensively increased. Technological systems as virtual reality represent nowadays novel and efficacy tools in several areas, such as in psychology and education. Realism, sense of presence, engagement, experimental control, and ecological validity represent some of the advantages than traditional methods based on paper and pencil tests. Furthermore, psychological research gathering information about a person relative to specific attributes, such as abilities, personality, and cognitive competences is usually conducted using pre-test-post-test designs. Such traditional assessments are not able to catch and examine the dynamic and composite performances and behaviours in run. Virtual stealth assessment could provide a valid and reliable method for evaluating real behaviours in real-time during the virtual experience. In this article, we proposed stealth assessment as a new methodological approach to study the Grawe’s model on the basic psychological needs by using virtual immersive environments, providing the theoretical development of the model on one psychological need with the relative virtual game.

Neglect App. Usability of a new application for assessment and rehabilitation of neglect

Unilateral Spatial Neglect is one of the most common neuropsychological disorders that can occur after vascular brain accidents. Virtual reality is a new paradigm that showed its effectiveness in clinical setting, enhancing the traditional methods of assessment and rehabilitation. However, usability of a virtual reality system is often undervalued. In this study we present and test the usability of a new mobile virtual reality platform: Neglect App. For the usability evaluation we interviewed four neuropsychologists. The expert showed problems only in five of the fourteen tasks. Only two tasks presented an high (negative) impact on the usability of the application. The results of the SUS showed high levels of usability of our application, both for the assessment and the rehabilitation parts.