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Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access originally published online on March 28, 2008
Schizophrenia Bulletin 2008 34(4):605-610; doi:10.1093/schbul/sbn020
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© 2008 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Studying and Treating Schizophrenia Using Virtual Reality: A New Paradigm

Daniel Freeman1,2
2 Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, Denmark Hill, London, SE5 8AF, UK

1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 020-7848-5003; fax: 020-7848-5006; e-mail: d.freeman{at}iop.kcl.ac.uk.

Understanding schizophrenia requires consideration of patients’ interactions in the social world. Misinterpretation of other peoples’ behavior is a key feature of persecutory ideation. The occurrence and intensity of hallucinations is affected by the social context. Negative symptoms such as anhedonia, asociality, and blunted affect reflect difficulties in social interactions. Withdrawal and avoidance of other people is frequent in schizophrenia, leading to isolation and rumination. The use of virtual reality (VR)—interactive immersive computer environments—allows one of the key variables in understanding psychosis, social environments, to be controlled, providing exciting applications to research and treatment. Seven applications of virtual social environments to schizophrenia are set out: symptom assessment, identification of symptom markers, establishment of predictive factors, tests of putative causal factors, investigation of the differential prediction of symptoms, determination of toxic elements in the environment, and development of treatment. The initial VR studies of persecutory ideation, which illustrate the ascription of personalities and mental states to virtual people, are highlighted. VR, suitably applied, holds great promise in furthering the understanding and treatment of psychosis.

Keywords: virtual reality / schizophrenia / delusions / hallucinations


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