Offenders become the victim in virtual reality: impact of changing perspective in domestic violence

Abstract

The role of empathy and perspective-taking in preventing aggressive behaviors has been highlighted in several theoretical models. In this study, we used immersive virtual reality to induce a full body ownership illusion that allows offenders to be in the body of a victim of domestic abuse. A group of male domestic violence offenders and a control group without a history of violence experienced a virtual scene of abuse in first-person perspective. During the virtual encounter, the participants’ real bodies were replaced with a life-sized virtual female body that moved synchronously with their own real movements. Participants' emotion recognition skills were assessed before and after the virtual experience. Our results revealed that offenders have a significantly lower ability to recognize fear in female faces compared to controls, with a bias towards classifying fearful faces as happy. After being embodied in a female victim, offenders improved their ability to recognize fearful female faces and reduced their bias towards recognizing fearful faces as happy. For the first time, we demonstrate that changing the perspective of an aggressive population through immersive virtual reality can modify socio-perceptual processes such as emotion recognition, thought to underlie this specific form of aggressive behaviors.

Measuring perceived self-location in virtual reality

“…Yet, the study of self-location should benefit from VR. First, VR allows interacting with avatars in realistic, ecological, and controlled environments [29][30][31][32] . Second, VR is characterized by presence, the feeling of being "there", even when a virtual character is not shown in the VR environment, modifying the perceived self-location 30,33 .…”

The Ethics of Realism in Virtual and Augmented Reality

“…In VR it is possible to give people the illusion that they have another body (Yee et al, 2009;Slater et al, 2010), and that their body has changed in some fundamental way. For example, adults can have the illusion of having a child body (Banakou et al, 2013), or white people a black body (Peck et al, 2013;Banakou et al, 2016), and these experiences change the participants-for example parents changing their behavior toward their children (Hamilton-Giachritsis et al, 2018), white people becoming more (Groom et al, 2009) or less implicitly biased against black (Maister et al, 2015), domestic violence offenders improving their recognition of fear in the faces of women after being embodied as a woman subject to abuse by a virtual man (Seinfeld et al, 2018), and so on. Scientific research has tended to explore positive benefits such as these.…”

“…Thanks to this, VR has become increasingly used for therapeutic purposes including pain management (Matamala-Gomez et al, 2019) and treatment of phobias and anxiety disorders (Freeman et al, 2017). The therapeutic potential in other realms has already been experimentally tested, such as for physical rehabilitation, for example, (Levin et al, 2015), for the rehabilitation of violent offenders (Seinfeld et al, 2018), and for the assessment of symptoms and neurocognitive deficits in people experiencing or at risk of psychosis (Rus-Calafell et al, 2018). Its use for training purposes in several areas including military, medicine, surgery, and disaster response, among others, is also gaining popularity (Spiegel, 2018;Vehtari et al, 2019).…”

A paradigm description of virtual reality and its possible applications in psychiatry

“…Z kolei Slater i Kokkinara [24] udowodnili, że przy zastosowaniu perspektywy pierwszej osoby synchronizacja wzrokowo--motoryczna daje silniejszą iluzję posiadania wirtualnego ciała niż synchroniczna stymulacja dotykowo-wzrokowa. Przytaczany tu system śledzenia ruchów ciała (full body tracking system) jest jednym z nowszych ulepszeń technologii VR, coraz częściej stosowanym w badaniach [25][26][27][28][29]. Zwykle ma postać kostiumu zakładanego na całe ciało lub jego część.…”