Body illusions for mental health: a systematic review

Abstract

<p>Body illusions (BIs) refer to altered perceptual states where the perception of the self-body significantly deviates from the configuration of the physical body, for example, in aspects like perceived size, shape, posture, location, and sense of ownership. Different established experimental paradigms allow to temporarily induce such altered perceptual states in a predictable and systematic manner. There is evidence demonstrating the use of BIs in clinical neuroscience, however, to our knowledge, this is the first systematic review evaluating the effectiveness of BIs in healthy and clinical populations. This systematic review examined the use of BIs in the healthy and clinical populations, and review how BIs can be adopted to enhance mental health in different mental illness conditions. The systematic review was conducted following the PRISMA guidelines. Of the 8086 studies identified, 189 studies were included for full-text analyses. Seventy-seven studies used BIs in clinical populations. Most of the studies using BIs with clinical populations used body illusions toward a body part, modulating the external aspects of body representation. Even though clinical studies showed the positive effects of BIs to improve mental illness conditions, future technologies using BIs targeting both the external (exteroceptive) and the internal (interoceptive) aspects of body representations can further improve the efficacy of this approach.</p>

AN-VR-BE. A Randomized Controlled Trial for Reducing Fear of Gaining Weight and Other Eating Disorder Symptoms in Anorexia Nervosa through Virtual Reality-Based Body Exposure

“…However, there are only a few treatment approaches directly targeting body distortion or assessing changes before and after usual inpatient treatment in AN [ 82 ]. One key aspect of using a VR embodiment-based procedure is that it allows individuals to realistically experience a virtual body as their own body, eliciting the same sensorial responses or activating the same implicit or explicit multisensory representations of their own body [ 83 , 84 ]. Moreover, the modification of the size or shape of the virtual body can be used to improve the disturbed representation of the body, as has been reported in patients with AN [ 46 , 52 ] and patients with other mental health issues [ 84 ].…”

“…One key aspect of using a VR embodiment-based procedure is that it allows individuals to realistically experience a virtual body as their own body, eliciting the same sensorial responses or activating the same implicit or explicit multisensory representations of their own body [ 83 , 84 ]. Moreover, the modification of the size or shape of the virtual body can be used to improve the disturbed representation of the body, as has been reported in patients with AN [ 46 , 52 ] and patients with other mental health issues [ 84 ]. The current study is the first to elicit changes in body distortion after several repeated treatment sessions, in contrast to previous studies that reduced body distortion levels in patients with AN after one single session of exposure to a standard healthy body [ 46 , 52 ].…”

Virtual reality expands the toolkit for conducting health psychology research

“…Researchers in other domains have already altered users’ apparent weight (Ferrer‐Garcia et al., 2017), height (Freeman et al., 2014), and visual acuity (Boumenir et al., 2014) to give users a taste of what it may be like to have different characteristics and restrictions. These experiences have mostly been used as interventions to increase empathy or reduce stigma (see Matamala‐Gomez et al., 2020 for review), but researchers have also used simulated physical changes to motivate healthy behaviors. For example, Fox and Bailenson (2009) demonstrated that virtually simulating changes in body size in accordance with the amount of exercise that participants completed led to greater subsequent voluntary exercise.…”

A Methodological Framework for Assessing Social Presence in Music Interactions in Virtual Reality

“…Another category, selfpresence is rooted in the capacity of VR to map the physical body movements of a user onto the moving body of a virtual avatar. The potential of embodying virtual avatars allows to create the illusory feeling for a user of owning, controlling, and being inside another body than its physical one (selfpresence) (Kilteni et al, 2012;De Oliveira et al, 2016;Braun et al, 2018;Matamala-Gomez et al, 2020). In addition, (bodily) acting within a virtual social context may create a sense of being together (co-presence), or interacting with others (social presence) while actually being physically remote (Short et al, 1976;Garau et al, 2005;Parsons et al, 2017;Oh et al, 2018).…”