3-D virtual scenario for psychotherapeutic purpose

[steffenmoritz]

Dear users,
I am a psychologist from Hamburg (Germany). As many of you might know, 3-D virtual realities are increasingly used to treat people with anxiety disorders to step-by-step confront them with situations they typically avoid due to exaggerated and unjustified fear (e.g. spiders, social events, height etc.). Learning in a virtual environment that initial fear finally decreases and can be coped with eventually encourages many patients to re-conquer their real environment (in fact, many patients, for example with agoraphobia, never leave the house). For a scientific project we would like to transfer this idea to people with schizophrenia who hear voices and feel persecuted for no reason (note: this is not split personality). We would like to set-up two basically similar environments located in two office complexes. The patients should navigate through the buildings one at a time and will see faces of employes through glass doors, some neutral, some in a good mood and some in a bad mood. The story plot is that the patient is going to job interviews and has to cross floors etc. to finally arrive at the designated office for the appointment (here the scenario ends). In one scenario the patient is going to a job interview in a media enterprise and while going through the floors will hear loud music that by most people's opinions would be called stressful (we can apply this via earphones so this does not have to be part of the programming). As stress in many patients enhances feelings of being watched and spied at we would like to see if in this scenario patients afterwards indeed report to a greater extentthat the employes they saw through the glass doors were hostile or looking at angrily him/her. Since both environments are virtually the same except for a somewhat different floor arrangements, we can later use this feed-back to teach patients that it was the stress that guided their interpretation and not the situation per se as in fact no one was looking at them. Although the levels of stress are low, we will consult the ethics commission for approval.

We would like to add this program in our existing treatment program for schizophrenia patients entitled metacognitive training: www.uke.de/mkt which we provide free-of-charge to psychologists and psychiatrists.

My question:

Since I am unable to program myself, I would be grateful if one of you could set-up the environment for us. I am aware that this is probably a lot of work. However, the person will not only be credited as additional author on potential scientific publications but in case we receive grant money for the idea (e.g. National Institute of Health or German Research Foundation) we can later reimburse the person. However, while we can promise co-authorship we cannot promise reimbursement in advance as not all grant applications are finally funded. Again, our idea is to provide schizophrenia patients with correcting experiences and use 3-D as a tool to alter misperception. The study will be conducted for the sake of the patients' health and not only to observe interesting effects.

I would be grateful for your response and help.

Very kind regards,

Steffen


Steffen Moritz, Ph.D.
Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie
Martinistraße 52
20246 Hamburg
moritz@uke.uni-hamburg.de
GERMANY