TILT – Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology
Research Review
When Virtu Meets Offlin It has long been known that behaviours learned or practiced in virtual environments have the potential to impact on offline behaviour and that these carry clear implications for their relevance to counselling, psychotherapy and coaching. This brief article can only give a small sampling of the wealth of research materials that have been developed over the past two decades. As long ago as the mid-1990s, when contemporary reports still described virtual environments as being in their infancy (McComas et al, 1998), Riva et al (1998) already noted that “Virtual Reality (VR) offers the potential to develop human testing and training environments that allow for the precise control of complex stimulus presentations in which human cognitive and functional performance can be accurately assessed and rehabilitated.” Among their reports, McComas et al (1998) already indicated important benefits, for example for children with disabilities, including improvements in quality of life, social participation and life skills and, importantly,
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the transfer of skills and knowledge to offline experiencing (e.g. Standen and Cromby, 1995). The potential of VR in assessment and delivery of counselling and psychotherapy or as an aid to intervention in itself is now increasingly well established, for example in treating specific phobias (Botella et al, 1998; 2000; Parsons and Rizzo, 2008), even when used in the reduced formats available for mobile phones or through ‘serious gaming’ and augmented reality features (Botella et al, 2011), and with good results for treating phobias in children and young people (Bouchard, 2011). Just a sample of other conditions for which evidence is available includes PTSD (Difede and Hoffman, 2002; Rizzo et al, 2009; Reger et al, 2011), ADHD (Parsons et al, 2007; Anton et al, 2009), Anxiety Disorders (Powers and Emmelkamp, 2007), Autism (Mundy, 2010; Jarrold et al, 2010;) among numerous others (see Anthony et al., 2011 for further resources) in addition to the use of virtual environments as tools for such things as social support (Green-Hamann, et al., 2011) and increasing practitioners’ understanding of