A Novel Integrating Virtual Reality Approach for the Assessment of the Attachment Behavioral System

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) technology represents a novel and powerful tool for behavioral research in psychological assessment. VR provides simulated experiences able to create the sensation of undergoing real situations. Users become active participants in the virtual environment seeing, hearing, feeling, and actuating as if they were in the real world. Currently, the most psychological VR applications concern the treatment of various mental disorders but not the assessment, that it is mainly based on paper and pencil tests. The observation of behaviors is costly, labor-intensive, and it is hard to create social situations in laboratory settings, even if the observation of actual behaviors could be particularly informative. In this framework, social stressful experiences can activate various behaviors of attachment for a significant person that can help to control and soothe them to promote individual’s well-being. Social support seeking, physical proximity, and positive and negative behaviors represent the main attachment behaviors that people can carry out during experiences of distress. We proposed VR as a novel integrating approach to measure real attachment behaviors. The first studies on attachment behavioral system by VR showed the potentiality of this approach. To improve the assessment during the VR experience, we proposed virtual stealth assessment (VSA) as a new method. VSA could represent a valid and novel technique to measure various psychological attributes in real-time during the virtual experience. The possible use of this method in psychology could be to generate a more complete, exhaustive, and accurate individual’s psychological evaluation.

Development and Calibration of an Eye-Tracking Fixation Identification Algorithm for Immersive Virtual Reality

“…While the gaming industry is taking the lead in the development of VR, it has also found many research applications. VR allows the simulation of experiences which create the sensation of being in the real world [ 2 ]. It is very helpful in human-subject-based experiments that are difficult to perform in the real world; it offers environment simulations under controlled laboratory conditions where researchers can efficiently isolate and manipulate features while keeping the other environmental stimuli unchanged [ 3 , 4 ].…”

Virtual Reality in Marketing: A Framework, Review, and Research Agenda

“…Extended Reality technologies have already been successfully applied as methodological tools in other scientific disciplines, such as neuroscience (Fox et al, 2009), psychology (Teo et al, 2016), education (Bruer, 2008), medicine (Chicchi Giglioli et al, 2017; McGrath et al, 2018), and human resources (Alcañiz et al, 2018). Therefore, it is not surprising that marketing researchers are showing interest in XRs as a new e-commerce marketing channel with great interactive capacity and totally innovative contents that, to date, have been unavailable to marketing scholars and industry.…”

Emotion Recognition in Immersive Virtual Reality: From Statistics to Affective Computing

“…Nonetheless, VR has been used in research since the 1990s [4]. The scientific interest in VR is due to the fact that it provides simulated experiences that create the sensation of being in the real world [5]. In particular, environmental simulations are representations of physical environments that allow researchers to analyse reactions to common concepts [6].…”