Virtual Viewing Time: The Relationship between Presence and Sexual Interest in Androphilic and Gynephilic Men

This chapter provides an introduction to the field of clinical forensic psychology. It focuses on four general topics. First, we provide a definition of forensic psychology and a discussion of how it fits within clinical psychology, arguing that psychologists who work in the field of forensic psychology must have specialized training and experience in the field. Second, we discuss the legal parameters within which forensic assessments are conducted and note that legal standards establish the parameters of the assessment and help focus the clinician's task. We introduce and discuss the psycholegal content analysis approach to forensic assessment. Next, we review some of the contemporary issues in forensic assessment, including the effect of the clinical versus actuarial debate for the field, the development of the legally informed practitioner model, the roles and limits of general psychological testing in forensic contexts, legal specificity and training in forensic psychology. Finally, we discuss some future concerns that should be addressed in the field. In particular, we raise concerns about quality control in forensic assessment and identify areas that require further development (i.e., civil forensic assessment, forensic assessments with youth, women, and visible minorities). Keywords: assessment; forensic psychology; law

The use of virtual reality permits individuals' reactions to standard controlled environments to be studied. It may therefore provide a means for understanding the interpretations of experience relevant to clinical disorders. The use of this technology for understanding persecutory ideation has not been investigated. A pilot study was undertaken to examine whether individuals have persecutory thoughts about virtual reality characters under controlled conditions and if there are factors that predict the occurrence of such thoughts.Twenty-four nonclinical participants entered a neutral virtual environment that contained computer-generated people. The participants completed dimensional assessments of items related to psychiatric symptoms and their thoughts about the virtual characters. Positive views about the virtual characters were common. However, a number of participants had ideas of reference and ideas of persecution about the virtual characters. Individuals who had persecutory thoughts about the virtual characters had significantly higher levels of interpersonal sensitivity and anxiety. The study provides direct evidence that individuals attribute mental states to virtual reality characters. Important for the study of clinical phenomena, some individuals have thoughts of a persecutory nature about virtual characters. Additionally, the findings indicate that feelings of interpersonal vulnerability and anxiety may directly contribute to the development of persecutory ideation in response to essentially neutral contexts. Virtual reality may prove to be a valuable methodology for developing an understanding of persecutory ideation.

The study aims to explore changes in learning outcome after using virtual reality instruments as teaching materials for college English courses, specifically, how digital environment affects the performance and motivation among undergraduates. Virtual reality has been widely applied in education settings. Its interactive interfaces provide students with realistic experiences and simulated everyday situations in a three-dimensional context for more authentic practice. The study focuses on the effect of incorporating Second Life, a virtual reality system, into college English classes. A semiexperiment is conducted in which an experimental group is taught with Second Life system, while the control group receives conventional one-way lectures. Result of the study shows significant improvement in the group of first year students who were taught using virtual characters. In addition, using virtual reality as teaching aids greatly improves students’ performance and motivation. Both the process and the result of the study imply potential benefit in using virtual systems and characters to improve language pedagogy and learner’s motivation respectively. The study proposes that virtual reality be incorporated into advanced English courses as a way to provide contextualized language learning.

High-immersive virtual reality (VR) environments can increase enjoyment and frequency of exercise participation. As VR can also be used to manipulate sensory feedback it is possible that specialist environments can modulate exercise performance and ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) and breathlessness. We aimed to (i) assess whether cycling in a “congruent” VR environment (where perceived/virtual exercise intensity and actual pedaling resistance are matched) enhances exercise performance and reduces RPE and breathlessness, and (ii) to assess whether cycling in an “incongruent” VR environment can further manipulate these perceptions. Following familiarisation, 14 healthy (7 male, 26 ± 2 years) participants repeated a series of four cycling exercise trials on a gradient adjustable ergometer under two conditions: within VR (VR condition; comprising of a custom-made VR environment in a head mounted display) and without VR (nVR condition). Within VR, the hill gradient experienced was either congruent or incongruent with the pedalling resistance. Participants could choose their power output/RPM throughout. During congruent trials participants chose to perform at a higher power output in the VR condition (+11 W ± 14, p < 0.05) with no difference in RPE or breathlessness. There was also a significant interaction between condition (VR vs nVR) and congruence for RPE and breathlessness. Specifically, when the experienced hill gradient was steeper than pedalling resistance RPE and breathlessness was greater, and when experienced hill gradient was less steep than pedalling resistance RPE and breathlessness was lower. In conclusion, we have shown that congruent VR cycling environments can modulate exercise performance. Furthermore, the novel application of incongruent VR cycling exercise manipulated exercise perceptions in either direction. This technique has potential applications in exercise training or rehabilitation modalities.

BackgroundMany people with psychotic disorder experience problems in social functioning, such as finding and maintaining jobs and relationships, which have been shown to be strongly related to deficits in social cognition. A class of interventions called Social Cognition Training (SCT) aims to improve social cognition through practice and strategy training. SCT has been shown to have positive effects on social cognition. (Social) cognition training, however, is known to optimally translate to functional skills when it is applied to and integrated with different areas of daily life. To promote the transfer of training skills to functional domains, it may therefore be beneficial to provide SCT in virtual reality (VR), since it closely resembles real-life social situations. VR is highly realistic and interactive, allowing for practice of social situations in ecologically valid environments. VR is also controllable, allowing for personalization of situations and difficulty level. In the present study, we tested the acceptance and feasibility of a newly developed VR SCT called ‘DiSCoVR’ (Dynamic Interactive Social Cognition Training in Virtual Reality).MethodsTwenty-two individuals with a psychotic disorder were recruited from three mental health institutions in the Netherlands. All participants received a VR SCT, which was aimed at three domains: 1) emotion perception (identifying virtual characters’ emotions in a virtual street); 2) social perception and theory of mind (understanding social situations and the thoughts, emotions and behavior of virtual characters); and 3) practicing social interactions with a virtual character. The intervention strongly emphasized practice with social situations in VR between, and with, virtual characters. Participants also learned strategies to cope with difficulties they experienced in social situations. Participants were assessed at baseline and post-treatment. Acceptance of the intervention was evaluated at post-treatment using a questionnaire. Social cognition was also assessed (emotion perception, social perception and theory of mind) using video/photo tasks and stories. Finally, psychotic symptoms, social anxiety, paranoia, self-esteem and depression were measured using an interview and questionnaires.ResultsThe results of this pilot study will be presented, focusing on the findings regarding acceptance and feasibility, but also social cognition and other secondary outcome domains.DiscussionThe implications of the findings of the pilot study will be discussed in the context of the preparation of a randomized controlled trial of DiSCoVR (for example, necessary alterations to the protocol and/or VR software). Plans for this randomized controlled trial will be discussed.

In the previous chapter, I have presented different types of computer-based applications, particularly considering the umbrella term Virtual Reality (VR) ranging from 2D VR presented on a 2D computer monitor, Augmented (Virtual) Reality, Immersive (Virtual) Reality, and Mixed (Virtual) Reality. Also, by now, you know the use of the VR-based solutions in addressing skill deficits of children with autism. Additionally, you are aware of the numerous advantages of using VR particularly for individuals with autism. The VR can serve as an excellent tool in the hands of the interventionists for offering different training scenarios to the users, controllable levels of challenge based on an individual’s specific abilities, adaptive skill learning environment, etc. Researchers around the globe have been using VR for individuals with autism while offering them tasks that can contribute to improvement in social communication, emotion recognition, joint attention, etc. Offering skill training in at least some of these core deficit areas is important since the children with autism are often characterized by deficit in making socially appropriate reciprocation while carrying out back-and-forth communication with social partners, understanding facial emotional expressions, following the gaze of a social partner to triangulate to an object of interest through shared attention, etc. In this chapter, I will present detailed information on the building of the various components, such as Graphical User Interface, virtual characters, individualized and adaptive feedback of 2D VR-based applications.

We introduce a novel technique for the study of human–virtual character interaction in immersive virtual reality. The human participants verbally administered a standard questionnaire about social anxiety to a virtual female character, which responded to each question through speech and body movements. The purpose was to study the extent to which participants responded differently to characters that exhibited different personalities, even though the verbal content of their answers was always the same. A separate online study provided evidence that our intention to create two different personality types had been successful. In the main between-groups experiment that utilized a Cave system there were 24 male participants, where 12 interacted with a female virtual character portrayed to exhibit shyness and the remaining 12 with an identical but more confident virtual character. Our results indicate that although the content of the verbal responses of both virtual characters was the same, participants showed different subjective and behavioral responses to the two different personalities. In particular participants evaluated the shy character more positively, for example, expressing willingness to spend more time with her. Participants evaluated the confident character more negatively and waited for a significantly longer time to call her back after she had left the scene in order to answer a telephone call. The method whereby participants interviewed the virtual character allowed naturalistic conversation while avoiding the necessity of speech processing and generation, and natural language understanding. It is therefore a useful method for the study of the impact of virtual character personality on participant responses.

Female Voice-Related Sexual Attractiveness to Males: Does it Vary With Different Degrees of Conception Likelihood?

How virtual reality affects consumer choice

Simulating realistic interactions between virtual characters has been of interest to research communities for years, and is particularly important to automatically populate virtual environments. This problem requires to accurately understand and model how humans interact, which can be difficult to assess. In this context, Virtual Reality (VR) is a powerful tool to study human behaviour, especially as it allows assessing conditions which are both ecological and controlled. While VR was shown to allow realistic collision avoidance adaptations, in the frame of the ecological theory of perception and action, interactions between walkers can not solely be characterized through motion adaptations but also through the perception processes involved in such interactions. The objective of this paper is therefore to evaluate how different VR setups influence gaze behaviour during collision avoidance tasks between walkers. To this end, we designed an experiment involving a collision avoidance task between a participant and another walker (real confederate or virtual character). During this task, we compared both the partici-pant`s locomotion and gaze behaviour in a real environment and the same situation in different VR setups (including a CAVE, a screen and a Head-Mounted Display). Our results show that even if some quantitative differences exist, gaze behaviour is qualitatively similar between VR and real conditions. Especially, gaze behaviour in VR setups including a HMD is more in line with the real situation than the other setups. Furthermore, the outcome on motion adaptations confirms previous work, where collision avoidance behaviour is qualitatively similar in VR and real conditions. In conclusion, our results show that VR has potential for qualitative analysis of locomotion and gaze behaviour during collision avoidance. This opens perspectives in the design of new experiments to better understand human behaviour, in order to design more realistic virtual humans.

The impact of homonegativity on gynephilic men's visual attention toward non-preferred sexual targets

User Experience and Engagement in the Reality–Virtuality Continuum: A Special Issue Guest Editorial

Snowden, Wichter, and Gray (2008) demonstrated that an Implicit Association Test and a Priming Task both predicted the sexual orientation of gynephilic and androphilic men in terms of their attraction biases towards pictures of nude males and females. For both measures, relative bias scores were obtained, with no information on the separate response biases to each target gender. The present study sought to extend this research by assessing both relative and individual implicit biases using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). An explicit measure screened for men with androphilic (n = 16) or gynephilic (n = 16) orientations on the dimensions of “sexual attraction,” “sexual behavior,” “sexual fantasies,” “hetero/gay lifestyle,” and “self identification.” The IRAP involved responding “True” or “False” to pictures of nude males and females as either attractive or unattractive. Participants were required to respond in a manner consistent with their reported sexual orientation for half of the IRAP’s test blocks and inconsistent for the other half. Response latencies were recorded and analyzed. The IRAP revealed a non-orthogonal pattern of biases across the two groups and had an excellent ability to predict sexual orientation with areas under the curves of 1.0 for the relative bias score and .94 and .95 for the bias scores for the male and female pictures, respectively. Correlations between the IRAP and explicit measures of sexual orientation were consistently high. The findings support the IRAP as a potentially valuable tool in the study of sexual preferences.

One of the main characteristics of virtual reality (VR) is immersion, which leads to comprehensive illusions of reality. Accordingly, VR is used in many applications like entertainment, marketing, and training. Especially in training applications, the effect of immersion on training success is still not entirely clear, since too much immersion may cause side effects such as users experiencing high mental demand whereas too little may disturb users’ well-being. To further investigate the matter, we developed two virtual training environments, wherein users train a typical industrial assembly task either in low or high immersive VR. In a controlled pilot study, we additionally introduced a third condition, the control group, which justifies the necessity of the training. Immediately after the VR training session, each participant completed the corresponding real assembly task in which their performance was measured. Preliminary results from our pilot study show that participants trained in high immersive VR performed better, while negative side effects could not be detected.

In an EEG-based near real-time neurofeedback (NF) study in two parts using high immersive virtual reality (VR) we successfully trained healthy participants to downregulate their parietal alpha power, a neurophysiological correlate previously associated with enhanced sense of presence. The first part included n = 10 participants equipped with 128 and 64 channels gel-based active EEG electrodes in 10 sessions using standard bar feedback presented on a computer monitor. Nine participants were better than random at the 10th session and four improved over time. For the second part we reduced the electrode subset to 9 sponge-based active channels (2 frontal, 7 parietal around Pz) and a portable amplifier. Participants (n = 10) were trained each session within VR using bar feedback projected on a wall in the first 5 sessions and then controlling the flow of a water fountain. Participants were able to significantly downregulate their parietal alpha power after 5 sessions and learning occurred at the group level, with 7 participants showing both improvement over time and ability to modulate. However, these results were only shown during the fountain feedback and both ability and learning were non-significant in the VR projector condition. Based on self-reports, after excluding participants performing movements and closing their eyes, no particular mental strategy, such as relaxation, breathing or mental calculus was identified to help with alpha modulation. The hypothesized behavioral effect on sense of presence was not found nor any neurophysiological changes in fronto-parietal connectivity. While NF did not improve the sense of presence, we succeeded in adapting real-time NF training for high immersive VR technology via seamlessly embedded feedback in the form of a water fountain. The study showcases that NF is possible with sponge electrodes and portable EEG that would prove convenient in end-user (at home) or clinical setup. The dataset is publicly available on Openneuro.org.