Abstract
Immersive virtual reality is widely used for research and clinical purposes. Here we explored the impact of an immersive virtual scene of intimate partner violence experienced from the victim’s perspective (first person), as opposed to witnessing it as an observer (third person). We are ultimately interested in the potential of this approach to rehabilitate batterers and in understanding the mechanisms underlying this process. For this, non-offender men experienced the scene either from the perspective of the victim’s virtual body (a female avatar), which moved synchronously with the participants’ real movements, or from the perspective of an observer, while we recorded their behavior and physiological responses. We also evaluated through questionnaires, interviews and implicit association tests their subjective impressions and potential pre/post changes in implicit gender bias following the experience. We found that in all participants, regardless of perspective, the magnitude of the physiological reactions to virtual threatening stimuli was related to how vulnerable they felt for being a woman, the sensation that they could be assaulted, how useful the scene could be for batterer rehabilitation, and how different it would have been to experience the scenario on TV. Furthermore, we found that their level of identification with the female avatar correlated with the decrease in prejudice against women. Although the first-person perspective (1PP) facilitated taking the scene personally, generated a sensation of fear, helplessness, and vulnerability, and tended to induce greater behavioral and physiological reactions, we show that the potential for batterer rehabilitation originates from presence and identification with the victim, which in turn is more easily, but not exclusively, achieved through 1PP. This study is relevant for the development of advanced virtual reality tools for clinical purposes.
Highlights
Almost one-third of women worldwide have experienced intimate partner violence (World Health Organization [WHO], 2013)
Based on a qualitative analysis of the interview after virtual reality, we found that experiencing the virtual domestic violence scene from a 1PP and from a 3PP resulted in divergent perceptions and opinions (Table 3)
In this study we found that an immersive virtual reality scene of intimate partner violence experienced from the victim’s perspective, and to a lesser degree witnessed as an observer, could be a useful tool to be included in intervention programs to rehabilitate abusers
Summary
Almost one-third of women worldwide have experienced intimate partner violence (World Health Organization [WHO], 2013). The authors observed (1) that offenders have a reduced sensitivity to recognizing female fearful faces, when compared to males without a history of violence, and (2) that the offenders’ emotion recognition skills were improved, especially in their ability to recognize female fearful faces These findings stress the potential of immersive virtual technology to modulate sociocognitive processes. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments (Milgram, 1963, 1974) have been replicated in immersive virtual reality, supporting the potential of virtual worlds to create realistic situations to which people respond as if they were real despite them knowing their fictional origin (Slater et al, 2006; Gonzalez-Franco et al, 2018) These experiments endorse virtual reality as a tool to overcome the moral and ethical issues arising from studies such as Milgram’s. Our findings are relevant for the improvement in the efficacy of virtual reality designs, and contribute to the understanding of the factors that modulate the sensation of realness in virtual worlds, influencing the use of virtual reality for research and rehabilitation
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