Control of emotional characteristics of stimuli in virtual reality based psychotherapy
Siniša Popović, Zlatko Đukić, Vedran Križek, Davor Kukolja, Krešimir Petar Ćosić, Miroslav Slamić · 2007
Since the 1990's, virtual reality (VR) has been applied in psychotherapy of various anxiety disorders, from phobias to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). VR is often used with exposure therapy, in which the therapist helps the patients to face, process, and overcome their fears. In VR exposure therapy, the therapist via graphical user interface (GUI) delivers virtual stimuli to the patient at various times during the session, to elicit or lessen the patient's emotions in a therapeutic way. Contrary to the therapist's typical selection of virtual stimuli by specifying their content, the paper proposes selection of stimuli by specifying their emotional characteristics. From analysis of emotional characteristics, a common structure is defined for emotional annotations of stimuli and for control signals for stimuli selection. The structure enables disambiguation of control signals, resulting in display of appropriate content to the patient. Disambiguation can be accomplished by minimization of various distances between control signals and stimuli annotations. Preliminary design and development in the context of combat-related PTSD is described.