Looking fear in the eye: Gamified virtual reality exposure towards spiders for children using attention based feedback.

Many children around the globe suffer from spider phobia. Virtual reality exposure therapy is an effective phobia treatment, but so far predominantly tailored for adults. A gamified approach utilizing gaze interaction would allow for a more child-friendly and engaging experience, and provide the possibility to foster working mechanisms of exposure therapy. We developed an application in which children make spiders change in positively connoted ways (e.g., make them dance or shrink) if sufficient visual attention towards them is captured via eye tracking. Thereby, motivation for and positive affects during exposure towards spiders are aspired. In this pilot study on 21 children without (n = 11) and with fear of spiders (n = 10), we examined positive and negative affect during exposure to a virtual spider and to different gaze-related transformations of the spider within a quasi-experimental design. Within a one-group design, we additionally examined fear of spiders in spider fearful children before and one week after the intervention. We found that significantly more positive than negative affect was induced by the spiders' transformations in children without and with fear of spiders. Fear of spiders was furthermore significantly reduced in spider-fearful children, showing large effect sizes (d > .80). Findings indicate eligibility for future clinical use and evaluation in children with spider phobia.

Challenges in the development of hydrate phases as active pharmaceutical ingredients--an example.

The challenges during pilot plant scale-up of the SAR474832 API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) production in view of crystallization, isolation, drying and micronization are reported. A variety of different solid-state analytical and spectroscopic techniques (also coupled methods) were applied in order to understand the complex phase transition behaviour of the crystallographic phase (form 1) chosen for development: a partially non-stoichiometric channel-hydrate (x (1+1.25) H(2)O) crystallizing from pure water in the crystal habit of fine needles, which tend to agglomerate upon isolation and drying. Processes have been developed for drying, sieving and micronization by jetmilling to avoid non-desired phase transitions (overdrying effects) into other hydrate forms. Special methods have been established to minimize, monitor and control the formation of amorphous content during the particle size reduction steps. By optimizing all production parameters it was possible to produce API batches in 10 kg scale with physical quality suitable for oral formulations (e.g. particle size d 90 value<20 µm, water content and crystallographic phase corresponding to desired form 1 of SAR474832).