Introduction: The prospective of Virtual Reality (VR) in psychiatry concerns the possibility of creating social environments that cause the same answers in the real world. Aims: Evaluation emotional responses, rate the sense of presence and simulator sickness in a VR scenario with hallucinations simulations.
Methods: Fourty eight healthy volunteers have tried out an immersive experience in a virtual scenario for about 10 minutes. Through individualized simulations they lived visual and auditory hallucinations.
Results:
· PANAS (evaluation of the emotional state): from the comparison of the average values reached in the two scales we highlight: scale of positive affect (PA) M 28.13; SD 5.59; negative affect scale (NA) M 17.44; SD 6.27.
·SSQ (cybersickness): 47.9% of the volunteers reported the complete absence of symptoms and 52.1% reported negligible symptoms reaching a Total Score (TS) between 0 and <5.There is an absence of symptoms for the 16 disorders with M 36.25; SD 9.07. .
·Questionnaire (identification in the psychotic symptomatology and sense of presence):high levels of identification and sense of presence have been highlighted.
Conclusions: VR has no side effects; the simulation is able to simulate an emotional state found in psychosis; high sense of presence in the virtual scenario. In the future:
·Training courses for mental health workers.
·Support to cognitive behavioral therapy in the treatment of psychotic symptoms by giving patients the opportunity to confront their symptoms and learn a new coping strategy.
