Home » Mind & Soul » Anxiety » Pseudo-Social World

Pseudo-Social World

© Irene J. Sleight

Imagine a world where you could undo a faux pas, and confidently navigate from one social scene to the next. Sound incredulous?

Thanks to advancements in modern technology, a virtual reality (VR) world offers an effective technique for helping the socially anxious conquer their fear of embarrassment and scrutiny in social situations. It’s an innovative treatment protocol that uses VR exposure therapy to enhance the recovery process. By immersing a client in a pseudo-social world filled with visual and auditory stimuli similar to their feared situations, it helps to desensitize their fear in real life situations. The virtual world offers a variety of common and familiar scenes such as the supermarket, beach, restaurant, office, and an outdoor mall.

Unlike other anxiety disorders, social anxiety is a people-oriented problem, which requires practice in interacting with others. This isn’t always so easy to do because the very nature of the anxiety creates intense fear of what others will think or say. There's always the concern that someone really will say something insensitive like, “Why are you so weird?” Now, wouldn’t that just leave you chomping at the bit to try again? Probably not. (Incidentally, when others say something like that to you, it’s more a reflection of their own insecurity.)

One of the benefits of a virtual world is that it provides a safe environment to practice approaching different people in a variety of settings. It provides an opportunity to make eye contact with those who may illicit arousal with an uninviting glare, which may not effectively be done in real-life situations. As clients repetitiously encounter various settings, both their subjective and physiological fear will eventually diminish. This helps make real life exposure more tolerable, thus promoting a faster recovery.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the traditional form of treatment for social anxiety. It works on changing the interpretation of events, while systematically making behavioral changes to overcome one's anxiety. Dr. Brenda Wiederhold, PhD, Director of the Center for Advanced Multimedia Psychotherapy in San Diego, CA, uses virtual reality in conjunction with CBT to help her clients accelerate the desensitization process. The center is one of five sites nationwide that provides a self-controlled environment, using a head-mounted virtual reality display, and real-time physiological monitoring equipment. A variety of modalities are used to measure a client's stress response such as heart rate, respiration rate, skin temperature, sweat gland activity (similiar to a lie detector) and brain waves. As clients maneuver around in the VR world using a hand-held device, Dr. Wiederhold watches a monitor that mimics their exploration, while simultaneously observing their physiological response in the various settings. This provides useful information in assessing specific environmental and social triggers, as well as measuring the client’s progress. An interesting aspect of this protocol is discovering the correlation between one’s subjective fear and their actually physiological measurements. They don’t always coincide. Sometimes the subjective fear seems out of proportion to the subtle increase in their physiology, and other times their physiology seems to jump off the charts, while the client reports little distress. The objective is to be able to recognize and reconcile this discrepancy, and then lower both subjective and objective anxiety. The entire process lasts anywhere from 8-12 weekly sessions, and is customized for each client.

The copyright of the article Pseudo-Social World in Anxiety is owned by . Permission to republish Pseudo-Social World in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.