The behavioral modification article I read about was focused on the problem of Public Speaking Anxiety (PSA) and how there is a “virtual reality” cognitive behavior therapy for it. It explains not only PSA, but social phobias as a whole as well as all types of medical treatment for these phobias.
Public Speaking Anxiety, according to this bmo.sagepub.com article, is a fairly common phobia. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), though usually helpful in its maneuvers, sometimes finds difficulties in the exposing component of the process. This is due to the therapist’s lack of control in the situation in addition to the inability of the patient to imagine the scenario; rather, they are plunged into it. The article states that virtual reality CBT techniques (VRCBTs) are more beneficial than CBTs because they allow the therapist complete control over the perceived world of the patient. Tests showed that although differences in results were not adequately large enough to account for VRCBTs being better, the tests did in fact show that twice as many of the people that dropped out of the VRCBT dropped out of the CBT, showing its distress to some level with patients.
13% of the population is afflicted with social phobias, mostly in the form of public speaking, which can lead to strong problems in one’s social, work, and study life. In order to self-medicate the problem, a large number of people go towards drugs and alcohol on the path towards substance addiction rather than to get counseling and mental help. The article continues to go on about how CBTs and Cognitive Behavior Group Therapy (CBGTs) might have proven to be the best treatment regimens to date, but that VRCBTs still show great effectiveness for several phobias. In the end of the introduction, it states that the purpose was of the study was to test whether VRCBTs were viable, effective alternatives to CBTs. This inclusion enhances the reader’s preformed thoughts early on about the growing potential of the VRCBT technique.
The article continues to talk about the different areas affected by social phobias and underline main routes to which problems can be seen, in the forms of people catastrophizing events, personalizing impersonal events, magnifying danger, and minimizing their own adequate function. These tendencies result in perception of situations as dangerous, to an increase in anxiety-related physical sensations when encountering feared situations, to hypervigilance to the environment as well as to bodily sensations and thus avoidance of feared social situations. Avoidance, of course, prevents the phobic individual from encountering and disproving faulty cognitions. Therefore, faulty cognitions serve to maintain social phobia. (Freeman et al., 2004; Heimberg & Becker, 2002).
Continuing on the idea of the CBT, it discusses how the behavioral part of CBT is exposure to feared stimuli and how patients feel both a reduction in anxiety during exposure (habituation) and the absence of the “catastrophic” event he or she is anticipating. VR is defined as a situation in which sensory information is generated by a computer rather than by the natural environment. The more senses involved and the higher the degree of accuracy in the presentation, the higher the sense of immersion in VR (Stever, 1992). The most important line I find in the body of the article is that, “With technological advancement of computer programs, a greater sense of immersion is attainable, and the discrimination between real and virtual reality is blurred” (Shapiro & McDonald, 1992). I think this basically highlights the rest of the semi-medical, semi-philosophical description of the virtual reality CBT. It ends with a recollection of the similarities and differences between VRCBTs and CBTs and graphs to strengthen the argument for the new technique.
In the conclusion, the author overviews the entire experiment and recount that their true goal was to see wider employment of both VRCBTs and CBTs for PSA across the nation. It includes figures showing the cheap cost of treatment maintenance and ends well with an overall statement about the positive position the psychology world is going in.
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