Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: May 21, 2023
Date Accepted: Dec 5, 2023
Effectiveness and User Experience of Virtual Reality for Social Anxiety Diosrder: Systematic Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a debilitating psychiatric disorder that affects sufferers in occupational and social functioning. Virtual reality (VR) therapies can provide effective treatment to people with SAD; however, with rapid innovations in immersive VR technology, more contemporary research is required to examine the effectiveness and concomitant user experience outcomes (i.e., safety, usability, acceptability, and attrition) of emerging VR interventions for SAD.
Objective:
The aim of this systematic review was to examine the effectiveness and user experience of contemporary VR interventions among people with SAD.
Methods:
Cochrane Library, Emcare, PsycINFO, PubMED, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science databases were searched up to June 2022. De-duplicated search results were screened on title and abstract information. Full text examination was conducted on 71 articles. Studies of all designs and comparator groups were included if they appraised effectiveness and user experience outcomes with any immersive virtual reality intervention among people with SAD. A standardized coding sheet was used to extract data on key participant, intervention, comparator, outcome, and study design items.
Results:
Findings were tabulated and discussed with a narrative synthesis. A total of 18 studies met inclusion criteria.
Conclusions:
The findings show that VR exposure therapy-based interventions can generally provide effective, safe, usable, and acceptable treatment for adults with SAD. The average attrition rate from VR treatment is low (11.36%), despite some reported difficulties, including potential simulator sickness, exposure-based emotional distress, and problems with managing treatment delivered in a synchronous group setting. This review also reveals several research gaps, including a lack of VR treatment studies on children and adolescents with SAD as well as a paucity of standardized assessments of VR user experience interactions. More research studies are required to address these areas.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.