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SEM results for group difference, spatial presence, evaluation, contact, female gender, and age predicting anxiety, social proximity, empathy, and benevolence.
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People with mental disorders such as schizophrenia do not only suffer from the symptoms of their disorders but also from the stigma attached to it. Although direct intergroup contact is an effective tool to reduce stigmatization, it is rare in real life and costly to be established in interventions, and the success of traditional media campaigns is...
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Context 1
... Table 1 for the results. In Model 1, we compared the VR group with the control group and found that contact in VR did not decrease stigmatization in comparison to not having any exposure at all (RMSEA = 0.070, CFI = 0.921). ...Similar publications
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Citations
... The number of participants ranged from 16 to 579 in each group and included undergraduates (11 of 16 studies, 68.8%), high school students, patients, caregivers and the public, including online community. Four studies were randomized controlled trials [36,[41][42][43]. Ten studies adopted quasi-experimental design. ...
... Some interventions (4 of 16 studies, 25%) also allowed the participants to experience perceptual or sensory disturbances such as auditory hallucinations [35,[46][47][48]. The other interventions (2 of 16 studies, 13%) allowed participants to view scenarios of characters suffering from mental illnesses [42,45]. Please see Appendix A for Cochrane's risk of bias rating for each study. ...
... Seven studies examined stigma towards people with dementia [50], psychotic illnesses [41,42,46], mixed anxiety and depression [43] or a range of mental illnesses [36,49]. Most studies (five out of seven studies) found reduction of stigma for both within [36,50] and between group comparisons [36,41,43] while two studies did not [42,46]. ...
Interventions adopting augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) modalities allow participants to explore and experience realistic scenarios, making them useful psycho-educational tools for mental illnesses. This scoping review aims to evaluate the effectiveness of AR/VR interventions in improving (1) knowledge, (2) attitudes, (3) empathy and (4) stigma regarding people with mental illnesses. Literature on published studies in English up till April 2022 was searched within several databases. Sixteen articles were included. The majority of studies were conducted in the West (93.8%), within undergraduates (68.8%) but also amongst high school students, patients, caregivers, public including online community, and covered conditions including psychotic illnesses, dementia, anxiety and depression. A preponderance of these included studies which employed AR/VR based interventions observed improvements in knowledge (66.7%), attitudes (62.5%), empathy (100%) and reduction of stigma (71.4%) pertaining to people with mental illnesses. In the context of relatively limited studies, extant AR/VR based interventions could potentially improve knowledge, attitudes, empathy and decrease stigma regarding people with mental illness. Further research needs to be conducted in larger and more diverse samples to investigate the relatively beneficial effects of different AR/VR modalities and the durability of observed improvements of relevant outcomes of interests over time for different mental conditions.
... Few empirical studies have assessed the empathetic responses created by the exposure to an immersive (VR or 360-degree video) storytelling experience in comparison with other non-immersive media (normal 2D video or images). And none of these studies found significant positive results concerning the capabilities of VR to foster long-term empathy (Archer and Finger, 2018;Farmer, 2019;Stelzmann et al., 2021). It remains then unclear whether immersion experiences foster an empathic appreciation of the other. ...
This article looks through a critical media lens at mediated effects and ethical concerns of virtual reality (VR) applications that explore personal and social issues through embodiment and storytelling. In recent years, the press, immersive media practitioners and researchers have promoted the potential of virtual reality storytelling to foster empathy. This research offers an interdisciplinary narrative review, with an evidence-based approach to challenge the assumptions that VR films elicit empathy in the participant—what I refer to as the VR-empathy model. A review of literature from the fields of psychology, computer science, embodiment, medicine, and virtual reality was carried out to question and counter these claims through case studies of both fiction and non-fiction VR experiences. The results reveal that there is little empirical evidence of a correlation between VR exposure and an increase in empathy that motivates pro-social behavior, and a lack of research covering VR films exposure eliciting empathy. Furthermore, the results show an alarming lack of research into the long-term effects of VR films and other VR immersive experiences. This contribution aims to understand and demystify the current “empathy machine” rhetoric and calls for more rigorous, scientific research that can authenticate future claims and systemize ethical best practices.
... Ce type de contact virtuel a pu ainsi permettre de réduire la stigmatisation à l'égard de personnes vivant avec une schizophrénie, rencontrées par ce biais. 16 Néanmoins, Adu et coll. 7 soulignent que, pour que ces interventions directes ou médiatisées soient réellement efficaces dans la réduction de la stigmatisation de la maladie mentale, il faut qu'elles soient soutenues par une large adhésion sociale, impliquant non seulement l'enga gement des établissements liés à la santé, mais aussi des médias et des politiques publiques. ...
Stigmatization and self-stigmatization of people suffering from mental disorders have been denounced for several years, however they still impact treatment and identity construction. Education, social sharing, and institutional engagement are interventions that challenge public stigma. Interventions based on individual or group therapies that oppose self-stigma proved effective. Questions regarding the effects of media coverage or the intersectionality of stigmatized identities remain open. In this article, we made a summary of the current situation based on recent literature.
... Therefore, it seems essential for medical experts to proactively support journalists in addressing pedophilia and to ensure fact-based media coverage [42,120]. Previous scholars have suggested the use of low threshold offers such as fact boxes, guidelines [14,120] or (digital) contacted-based interventions [121][122][123] as a means to reach out to journalists as well as society. Informed Consent Statement: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study. ...
The public stigma associated with pedophilia, the sexual attraction to prepubescent children, is tremendous. Previous research indicates that undifferentiated media coverage plays an essential role in perpetuating the public stigma by falsely equating pedophilia and child sexual abuse (CSA) and thus may stop persons suffering from a pedophilic disorder from seeking professional help. Until now, a comprehensive examination of positive as well as negative media effects on affected individuals is missing. Therefore, the present study explores if and how media coverage impacts the lives of help-seeking persons with pedophilia by conducting four qualitative focus group discussions with a clinical sample (N = 20) from the German Prevention Network “Kein Täter werden”. Present results demonstrate that media coverage of pedophilia was perceived as mostly undifferentiated, even though participants observed an increase in fact-based reporting over the years. Moreover, it seems that media coverage has strong emotional and behavioral consequences for patients (e.g., negative reporting reduced self-esteem). In sum, our results highlight that differentiated media coverage could play a key role in supporting help-seeking persons with pedophilic disorder, while the impact of undifferentiated media coverage appears to be mostly negative. Therefore, our results point to the need to reframe pedophilia using differentiated media coverage to help affected persons receive treatment efficiently and thereby prevent CSA.
... The same controversy appears when looking at the intervention studies carried out from a majority perspective, which mostly show a solid persistence of prejudice towards stigmatised minorities [51,55,[61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69] Two recent studies [70,71] even report increased prejudice towards the contacted outgroup using explicit measures. ...
... Interestingly, while de Silva et al. [91] show increased empathy towards schizophrenic patients following an augmented reality experience, Kalyanaraman et al. [84] suggest that such embodied experience may lead to a desire for keeping a greater distance towards them. Stelzmann et al. [70] also find stronger stigmatisation of people with schizophrenia after facing an outgroup member in a 3D video. Hadjipanayi and Michel-Grigoriou [83] reach similar conclusions following embodiment in people with Asperger syndrome. ...
... By contrast, sixteen studies enacting bias-reducing interventions exclusively used explicit measures. A considerable number of them found a decrease in prejudice following embodiment in an outgroup member [52,53,[76][77][78]80,92]. Two studies by Peña et al. [71] and Steltzmann et al. [70] conversely found increased levels of prejudice after engaging in virtual intergroup contact with an outgroup member, and Hadjipanayi and Michel-Grigoriou [83] and Kalyanaraman et al. [84] obtain similar results through embodiment of an outgroup member. ...
This systematic review provides an up-to-date analysis of existing literature about Virtual Reality (VR) and prejudice. How has VR been used in studying intergroup attitudes, bias and prejudice, are VR interventions effective at reducing prejudice, and what methodological advantages and limitations does VR provide compared to traditional methods are the questions we aim to answer. The included studies had to use VR to create an interaction with one or more avatars belonging to an outgroup, and/or embodiment in an outgroup member; furthermore, they had to be quantitative and peer-reviewed. The review of the 64 included studies shows the potential of VR contact to improve intergroup relations. Nevertheless, the results suggest that under certain circumstances VR contact can increase prejudice as well. We discuss these results in relation to the intergroup perspective (i.e., minority or majority) and target minority groups used in the studies. An analysis of potential mediators and moderators is also carried out. We then identify and address the most pressing theoretical and methodological issues concerning VR as a method to reduce prejudice.
... In addition, as 2 of the studies [32,33] reported their results through standardized regression, the β coefficients were entered into the comprehensive meta-analysis software (CMA) as correlation coefficient, according to the recommendations of Peterson and Brown [34]. ...
Background:
Stigma toward people with mental illness presents serious consequences for the impacted individuals, such as social exclusion and increased difficulties in the recovery process. Recently, several interventions have been developed to mitigate public stigma, based on the use of innovative technologies, such as virtual reality and video games.
Objective:
This review aims to systematically review, synthesize, measure, and critically discuss experimental studies that measure the effect of technological interventions on stigmatization levels.
Methods:
This systematic review and meta-analysis was based on PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) guidelines and included studies in English and Spanish published between 2016 and 2021. Searches were run in 5 different databases (ie, PubMed, PsycInfo, Scopus, Cochrane Library, and ScienceDirect). Only randomized controlled trials were included. Two independent reviewers determined the eligibility, extracted data, and rated methodological quality of the studies. Meta-analyses were performed using the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software.
Results:
Based on the 1158 articles screened, 72 articles were evaluated as full text, of which 9 were included in the qualitative and quantitative syntheses. A diversity of interventions was observed, including video games, audiovisual simulation of hallucinations, virtual reality, and electronic contact with mental health services users. The meta-analysis (n=1832 participants) demonstrated that these interventions had a consistent medium effect on reducing the level of public stigma (d=–0.64; 95% CI 0.31-0.96; P<.001).
Conclusions:
Innovative interventions involving the use of technologies are an effective tool in stigma reduction, therefore new challenges are proposed and discussed for the demonstration of their adaptability to different contexts and countries, thus leading to their massification.
Trial Registration:
PROSPERO International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews CRD42021261935; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42021261935
... 19 Additionally, research in psychology has shown that "one approach to reducing stigmatization is to establish meaningful encounters between those who are affected by a mental disorder and those who are not". 20 Currently, there is a lack of experimental research in the realm of VR and mental illness stigma; however, preliminary research has been conducted and suggests that virtual environments can serve as effective proxies in battling implicit stereotypes. 21 Novel research in Europe has been performed to discover whether destigmatization of mental disorders, specifically, schizophrenia, could be enhanced through intergroup contact using VR. ...
... 21 Novel research in Europe has been performed to discover whether destigmatization of mental disorders, specifically, schizophrenia, could be enhanced through intergroup contact using VR. 20 Successful destigmatization was seen in a few conditions such as when "the encountered person appears likeable to the target audience". 20 Additionally, it was imperative that the contact was not "superficial once-off contact" 20 and that "repeated, positive intergroup contact such as friendships" 20 were stimulated, in order to decrease measures of stigmatization after the interaction. ...
... 20 Successful destigmatization was seen in a few conditions such as when "the encountered person appears likeable to the target audience". 20 Additionally, it was imperative that the contact was not "superficial once-off contact" 20 and that "repeated, positive intergroup contact such as friendships" 20 were stimulated, in order to decrease measures of stigmatization after the interaction. Ample research has shown that contact is an important strategy to decrease stereotypes and mental health stigma. ...
The objective of the following systematic literature review was to analyze the current stigma surrounding schizophrenia in North America, its implications, as well as to suggest potential interventions. The current societal climate reveals that many individuals lack an understanding of the etiology and symptoms of schizophrenia, leading to a general negative bias towards individuals with this disease. Additionally, many misperceptions such as enhanced violent tendencies surround patients with schizophrenia, exacerbating negative bias and actions such as avoidance. Suggestions to minimize stigma and its effects were made and include the renaming of schizophrenia, the use of virtual reality programs, the refinement of education programs, and an overall switch in how the media presents schizophrenia.
... Three studies compared a 360 degree video with a 2D version of the same material regarding its potential to elicit empathy toward the outgroup target. Seeing a 360 degree video of a man telling about his life with schizophrenia, did not lead participants to report more empathy with schizophrenic patients than in a normal video or in a control condition (Stelzmann et al., 2021). In Schutte and Stilinović's (2017) study, a refugee girl guided participants through the video, and the results showed that the more immersive 360 degree version led to higher empathy than the 2D version and this effect was mediated by the degree of engagement. ...
Virtual Reality (VR) has often been referred to as an “empathy machine.” This is mostly because it can induce empathy through embodiment experiences in outgroup membership. However, the potential of intergroup contact with an outgroup avatar in VR to increase empathy is less studied. Even though intergroup contact literature suggests that less threatening and more prosocial emotions are the key to understanding why intergroup contact is a powerful mean to decrease prejudice, few studies have investigated the effect of intergroup contact on empathy in VR. In this study, we developed a between-participants design to investigate how VR can be used to create a positive intergroup contact with a member of a stigmatized outgroup (ethnic minority) and present the results of the effect of intergroup contact in VR on empathy. Sixty four participants experienced either positive contact (i.e., equal intergroup status, collaborative) with a black (experimenter-controlled) avatar (experimental condition) or no intergroup contact (i.e., ingroup contact with a white avatar; control condition), with situational empathy (personal distress and empathic interest) being measured through a self-report questionnaire up to a week before and right after the VR contact experience. The experiment showed that satisfying degrees of body ownership of participants’ own avatar and co-presence with the contacted avatar can be achieved in simple and universally accessible virtual environments such as AltspaceVR. The results indicated that while VR intergroup contact had no significant direct effect on empathy, exploratory analyses indicated that post-intervention empathic interest increased with stronger feelings of co-presence in the intergroup contact condition.
... Since three of the studies included more than one scale that assessed levels of stigma [11,22,31], we conducted an analysis that combined them into a single effect size. In addition, as two of the studies [32,33] reported their results through standardized regression, the beta coefficients were entered into the comprehensive meta-analysis software (CMA) as correlation coefficient, according to the recommendations of Peterson & Brown [34]. ...
BACKGROUND
Stigma towards people with mental illness presents serious consequences for the affected individuals, such as social exclusion and increased difficulties in the recovery process. Recently, several interventions have been developed to mitigate public stigma, based on the use of innovative technologies, such as virtual reality and video games.
OBJECTIVE
To systematically review, synthesize, measure, and critically discuss experimental studies that measure the effect of technological interventions and on stigmatization levels.
METHODS
This systematic review and meta-analysis was based on PRISMA guidelines, and included studies in English and Spanish published during the years 2016 and 2021. Searches were run in five different databases (i.e., Pubmed, PsycInfo, Scopus, Cochrane Library, and Science Direct). Only randomized controlled trials were included. Two independent reviewers determined the eligibility, extracted data, and rated methodological quality of the studies. Meta-analyses were performed using the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software.
RESULTS
Based on the 1,158 articles screened, 72 articles were evaluated as full text, of which 9 articles were included in the qualitative and quantitative synthesis. A diversity of interventions was observed, including video games, audiovisual simulation of hallucinations, virtual reality, and electronic contact with mental health services users. The meta-analysis (n= 1,832 participants) demonstrated that these interventions had a consistent medium effect on reducing the level of public stigma (d=–0.64 95% CI 0.31-0.96; P<.001).
CONCLUSIONS
Innovative interventions involving the use of technologies are an effective tool in stigma reduction, therefore new challenges are proposed and discussed for the demonstration of their adaptability to different contexts and countries, thus leading to their massification.
... Daniela et al. used VR technology as a bridge to contact people with mental disorders and found that the impact of patients with mental disorders on normal people depends on the ideas of the normal people involved. The anxiety level of normal people who contact patients with mental disorders through VR is significantly lower than that of normal people who do not contact patients with mental disorders through VR [6]. ...
Visual sensing image technology has narrowed the distance between people and art with the rapid development of digital media, but new art forms continue to appear. Therefore, this exploration is aimed at studying the application of visual image technology based on user interface (UI) and virtual reality (VR) technology in art. This exploration is to explore the development path of digital media art. The concept of UI is briefly discussed. Based on the current means of visual sensing technology, UI, visual sensing image technology, and digital media art are successfully combined after the close relationship between digital media and art is realized. The results show that VR technology, which combines UI and visual sensing technology, has good compatibility with digital media art and can further shorten the distance between digital media art and the public. Moreover, the promotion of this application can greatly increase users’ experience of VR. In addition, most people hold a more positive attitude towards this combination. It reveals that it is essential to apply UI and visual sensing image technology to digital media art.
