Freeman et. al

• The first aim was to see if people with no history of mental illness have precautionary thoughts in virtual reality.
• The second objective was to determine if cognitive or emotional factors were predictive of precautionary ideation.
• The hypothesis: The researchers believed that a small amount of the participants would have precautionary thoughts in virtual reality, and those people would rank highly in terms of emotional distress and paranoia.
• The study had 24 participants.
• The sample consisted of 12 females and 12 males.
• Volunteer sampling was used.
• All were administrative staff or students from University College London in the UK.
• All the participants had a history of mental illness.
• It was a lab experiment.
• The participants were taught to use the VR set before the experiment started.
• The participants were put in a library scene that had five avatars in it. Three were sitting at one desk, two were sitting at another desk. The avatars occasionally do basic NPC behaviour like talking to each other, waving, and reading.
• The participants were told to explore the room to form an impression of the other people in the room and to try and assume what impression they had of them. (they were not told that the study was to investigate precautionary delusions, this can be a weakness as they were misled).
• After leaving the VR environment, the participants were made to answer many questionnaires like:

  • The Brief Symptom Inventory: It had 53 items and asked a range of questions about nine symptom dimensions over the last seven days.
  • Other questionnaires measured anxiety and paranoia.
• The brief symptom questionnaire measured interpersonal sensitivity, anxiety, depression, and psychoticism.
• The other questionnaires included closed questions where participants had to rate things on a numeric scale.
• Freeman found that there were significant differences between the paranoia scores on the questionnaires and the paranoia scores given in interviews.
• No difference in precautionary scores between men and women.
• Higher levels of interpersonal sensitivity and anxiety levels had close correlations
• Freeman concluded that people tend to attribute mental states to VR characters; most of the time, these assumptions are good but they can be precautionary.
• Freeman also found that people are more likely to have precautionary ideations if they have high levels of interpersonal sensitivity and anxiety.