Harnessing Immersive Virtual Reality: A Comprehensive Scoping Review of its Applications in Assessing, Understanding, and Treating Eating Disorders.

BACKGROUND: Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) has shown promise in the assessment, understanding, and treatment of eating disorders (EDs), providing a dynamic platform for clinical innovation. This scoping review aims to synthesize the recent advancements and applications of IVR in addressing these complex psychological disorders. METHODS: This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis Protocols, focusing on studies published in the past five years. It included peer-reviewed papers that used IVR for ED assessment, examination, or treatment. A comprehensive database search provided a selection of relevant articles, which were then methodically screened and analyzed. RESULTS: Twenty studies met the inclusion criteria, with a primary focus on Anorexia Nervosa (AN), Bulimia Nervosa (BN), and Binge Eating Disorder (BED). The application of IVR was categorized into three areas: assessment, understanding, and treatment. IVR was found to be an effective tool in assessing body image distortions and emotional responses to food, providing insights that are less accessible through traditional methods. Furthermore, IVR offers innovative treatment approaches by facilitating exposure therapy, modifying body-related biases, and enabling emotional regulation through embodied experiences. The studies demonstrate IVR's potential to improve body image accuracy, reduce food-related anxieties, and support behavioral changes in ED patients. CONCLUSION: IVR stands out as a transformative technology in the field of EDs, offering comprehensive benefits across diagnostic, therapeutic, and experiential domains. The IVR's ability to simulate the brain's predictive coding mechanisms provides a powerful avenue for delivering embodied, experiential interventions that can help recalibrate distorted body representations and dysfunctional affective predictive models implicated in EDs. Future research should continue to refine these applications, ensuring consistent methodologies and wider clinical trials to fully harness IVR's potential in clinical settings.

Binding body and self in visuo-vestibular conflicts.

Maintenance of the bodily self relies on the accurate integration of multisensory inputs in which visuo-vestibular cue integration is thought to play an essential role. Here, we tested in healthy volunteers how conflicting visuo-vestibular bodily input might impact on body self-coherence in a full body illusion set-up. Natural passive vestibular stimulation was provided on a motion platform, while visual input was manipulated using virtual reality equipment. Explicit (questionnaire) and implicit (skin temperature) measures were employed to assess illusory self-identification with either a mannequin or a control object. Questionnaire results pointed to a relatively small illusion, but hand skin temperature, plausibly an index of illusory body ownership, showed the predicted drop specifically in the condition when participants saw the mannequin moving in congruence with them. We argue that this implicit measure was accessible to visuo-vestibular modulation of the sense of self, possibly mediated by shared neural processes in the insula involved in vestibular and interoceptive signalling, thermoregulation and multisensory integration.

Wearing same- and opposite-sex virtual bodies and seeing them caressed in intimate areas.

Immersive virtual reality enables people to undergo the experience of owning an artificial body and vicariously feeling tactile stimuli delivered to it. However, it is currently unknown how such experiences are modified by the sexual congruency between the human and the artificial agent. In two studies, heterosexual men (Experiment 1) and women (Experiment 2) embodied same-sex and opposite-sex avatars and were asked to evaluate the experience (e.g., pleasantness, erogeneity) of being touched on social or intimate areas of their virtual body by a male or female avatar. Electrocardiogram and galvanic skin response were also recorded. Moreover, participants' implicit and explicit gender biases were examined via a gender-potency implicit association test and the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. When embodying a same-sex avatar, men and women rated caresses on intimate areas from an avatar of the opposite sex as more pleasant and erogenous. Conversely, body swap-that is, wearing an opposite-sex avatar-enhanced participants' perceptions of pleasantness and erogeneity for caresses on intimate areas from a same-sex toucher. This effect was stronger in men than in women. Furthermore, physiological correlates of enhanced processing of arousing stimuli predicted behavioural outcomes during the body swap illusion. Wearing an opposite-sex avatar affects one's own body representations and may have important implications on people's attitudes and implicit reactivity to touch-mediated interactions. Men seem more susceptible to this type of body swap illusion. Our paradigm may induce profound changes of cross-sex perspective-taking and provide novel tools for promoting empathy and comprehension of sex-related diversity.

Predictors of the Sense of Embodiment of a Female Victim of Sexual Harassment in a Male Sample Through 360-Degree Video-Based Virtual Reality.

The sense of embodiment refers to the set of sensations related to having (i.e., ownership), being located in (i.e., location), and controlling (i.e., agency) a virtual body. Recently, 360-degree video-based Virtual Reality (VR) has been used to manipulate the sense of embodiment, generating the body-swap illusion, that is, the illusionary switch from the real body to a virtual one. However, the psychological mechanisms involved in this illusion are still unknown. The present study is a secondary analysis of the study by Ventura et al. (2021) investigating the feasibility of 360-degree video to induce the body swap from a male's real body to a female virtual body in a sexual harassment virtual environment. In addition, the study explores whether the sense of presence and psychological trait variables related to sexual harassment (i.e., machismo, chivalry, alexithymia, empathic abilities) predict the illusion of owning the body of a female victim of sexual harassment. Forty-four men participated in the study, and the results indicate that the 360-degree video is able to induce the body-swap illusion for location and ownership, but not for agency. Multiple regression analyses showed that the sense of presence was a predictor of the three dimensions of embodiment, but specific psychological traits (i.e., low scores on machismo, high scores on difficulties expressing feelings, and high scores on perspective taking) were also predictor variables of experiencing a greater sense of location and agency in the female virtual body. This study shows that both technological issues and participants' psychological traits are involved in the experience of the body-swap illusion in a sexual harassment scenario using 360-degree video-based VR.