virtual reality (Freeman, 2008)

• Delusional disorder

  • When a person experiences persistent delusion (for a month or longer) but otherwise has normal behaviour.
  • It excludes positive or negative psychotic symptoms.
  • Types of delusional disorder:
  • Erotomanic: belief someone is in love with you.
  • Grandiose: belief that they have great unrecognised skill or status.
  • Jealous: belief that partner is unfaithful (paranoia).
  • Persecutory: belief that people are conspiring against or want to harm you (paranoia).
  • Bizarre delusion: logically impossible.
  • Non-bizarre: possible but unlikely.
• Using virtual reality (VR) for symptom assessment eliminates challenges such as misinterpretations of social interaction that can lead to paranoia and withdrawal in schizophrenia patients
• Symptom assessment in traditional settings heavily relies on the patient answering truthfully + discussing behaviour over the past week/month
• In VR, patients are presented with an artificial and neutral social situation with unresponsive avatars to assess the severity of paranoid delusions
• The VR assessment allows for a novel and standardized approach
• The patient's behavior can be easily monitored and the situation manipulated for assessment and treatment development
• Can be used to develop a treatment as: Factors that worsen or improve the patient's condition can be identified using VR
• Can be used to develop a treatment as: Patients can be exposed to persecutory fears in the VR environment to help them learn to cope with these fears in reality
• PROCEDURE: involved users taking a walk or a ride in a specifically designed library or underground train scene among neutral avatars while wearing VR headgear
• SAMPLE: Freeman's study was trialled on a non-clinical population of 200 students
• Before the test, multiple validated measurement tools, such as the 16-item Green Et al. Paranoid Thoughts Scale (GPTS) Part B, were used to assess the user's paranoid thinking, emotional distress, and other social and cognitive traits
• After the test, persecutory thinking, visual analogue rating scale (used to measure frequency of symptoms), and the degree of immersion in the virtual environment were measured
• RESULTS: showed that individuals with high scores on the paranoia assessment questionnaire had high levels of persecutory ideation
• RESULTS: Individuals who experience auditory hallucinations in the real world also experienced them in the VR environment