Contents
The standard treatment for phobias is exposure therapy. The patient, under the supervision of a psychologist, meets with what causes fear. Virtual reality technologies come to the rescue. For example, you can fight the fear of public speaking by “speaking” in front of a virtual audience.
Psychologist Youssef Shiban from the University of Regensburg (Germany) and colleagues decided to test the effectiveness of virtual therapy for the treatment of arachnophobia (fear of spiders). Scientists conducted a study in which 41 people who suffered from arachnophobia (the severity of the phobia was preliminarily assessed) and another 20 people who did not experience fear of spiders participated.
Participants were first shown a live spider (7,5 cm Chilean pink tarantula) three meters away in a transparent container and asked to rate its size. Next to the participants was a lever that moved the container with a spider, and they had to bring the container as close as possible to themselves and rate the level of fear on a scale from 0 to 10.
Then the volunteers put on a virtual reality helmet, through which they were shown four realistic-looking spiders of the same species, but much larger – about 30 cm. Such virtual sessions lasted 5 minutes and were held four times.
Pass the tests
- Do you have phobias?
Two weeks later, the researchers contacted the participants again and invited them to repeat the spider experiment. Many participants who suffered from arachnophobia refused or did not come this time (22 out of 41 participants who were afraid of spiders and 19 out of 20 healthy volunteers decided to repeat the experiment).
During the first experiment, almost all participants overestimated the actual size of the spider. In full accordance with the saying “fear has big eyes”, it seemed to suffer from arachnophobia by 80% (healthy volunteers overestimated its size by 40%).
However, during the second experiment, participants with arachnophobia already overestimated the size of the spider by 66% (estimates of healthy volunteers did not change significantly), while the level of fear they experienced decreased by 70%, which shows the effectiveness of exposure therapy using virtual reality technologies.
Подробнее см. Y. Shiban et al. «Treatment effect on biases in size estimation in spider phobia», Biological Psychology, March 2016.