Background: Providing students with virtual role-play experiences has the potential to bring counseling role-plays into large undergraduate courses. Objective: The purpose of this study was to trial a virtual reality role-play experience where students played the role of a student counsellor. Method: Seventy-three undergraduate psychology students played the role of a student counsellor interacting with a virtual client in two role-plays, one via desktop and one via head mounted display (HMD). Students provided feedback on their experience. Results: 70% of the students found the experiences very interesting, engaging and immersive, with 82% preferring the HMD mode of presentation. The virtual characters were believable as distressed clients with 96% of students perceiving greater negative than positive emotion expressed by the characters. Most of the students (64%) mood improved from the beginning of the experience to the end, however 14% experienced a decline in mood. The students agreed (95%) that the experiences would be a valuable experience to a psychology course. Conclusion: Our results provide evidence that the virtual role-play experiences are well-liked by students. Teaching Implications: The approach presented in this paper represents a practical method to provide virtual role-play experiences to both on-campus and online undergraduate students.

IntroductionBody size judgements are frequently biased, or inaccurate, and these errors are further exaggerated for individuals with eating disorders. Within the eating disorder literature, it has been suggested that exaggerated errors in body size judgements are due to difficulties with integration. Across two experiments, we developed a novel integration task, named the Ebbinghaus Illusion for Bodies in Virtual Reality (VR), to assess whether nearby bodies influence the perceived size of a single body. VR was used to simulate the appearance of a small crowd around a central target body.Method and ResultsIn Experiment 1 (N = 412), participants were required to judge the size of a central female target within a crowd. Experiment 1 revealed an Ebbinghaus Illusion, in which a central female appeared larger when surrounded by small distractors, but comparatively smaller when surrounded by large distractors. In other words, the findings of Experiment 1 demonstrate that surrounding crowd information is integrated when judging an individual’s body size; a novel measure of spatial integration (i.e., an Ebbinghaus Illusion for Bodies in VR). In Experiment 2 (N = 96), female participants were selected based on high (n = 43) and low (n = 53) eating disorder symptomatology. We examined whether the magnitude of this illusion would differ amongst those with elevated versus low eating disorder symptomatology, in accordance with weak central coherence theory, with the high symptomatology group displaying less spatial integration relative to the low group. The results of Experiment 2 similarly found an Ebbinghaus Illusion for Bodies in VR. However, illusion magnitude did not vary across high and low symptomatology groups.DiscussionOverall, these findings demonstrate that surrounding crowd information is integrated when judging individual body size; however, those with elevated eating disorder symptomatology did not show any integration deficit on this broader measure of spatial integration.