Effects of a Semantically Irrelevant Virtual Reality Experience on Memory and Emotion After Watching a Traumatic Event: Randomized Controlled Experimental Study

TL;DR

This study explores how a virtual reality experience unrelated to a traumatic event can affect emotions and memory, suggesting it may help with mental health after trauma.

Contribution

The study introduces semantically irrelevant VR as a novel intervention to modulate emotional responses after traumatic events.

Findings

Semantically irrelevant VR significantly increased positive emotions in participants.

All groups showed reduced negative emotions after the traumatic event.

VR did not affect memory accuracy of the traumatic event.

Abstract

First responders, such as firefighters, experience significant mental health issues due to the high-stress nature of their work. Existing mental health interventions, such as meditation and debriefing, despite their benefits, do not target cognitive processing of traumatic events such as memory and emotion.

This work aims to examine effects of semantically irrelevant virtual reality (VR) content to intervene in the retrieval of an adverse event memory and its associated emotions. Cognitive models of posttraumatic stress disorder posit that exposure to stimuli that are similar to a previous trauma acts as a trigger for retrieval of the associated memory and bodily reaction (eg, elevated heart rate). This work uses semantically irrelevant VR as an intervention to interrupt the retrieval of the traumatic memory by placing a participant in a VR environment that has a distant semantic connection to the trauma.

A total of 107 participants recruited from a large public university in Texas were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: control (n=33), comparison (n=37), and intervention (n=37). In stage 1, participants in all groups watched a short video of an actual severe house fire to create a traumatic event memory. In stage 2, the control group stayed seated without doing anything, the comparison group read a paragraph about the Red Sea as semantically irrelevant follow-up information, and the intervention group watched a 360° VR video of the Red Sea that featured opposite attributes to the fire (eg, blue water vs red fire, cool water vs hot fire). The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, which has 10 items for positive emotions (eg, attentive and excited) and 10 items for negative emotions (eg, scared and distressed), was administered after each of the two stages. In stage 3, the memory accuracy of the house fire video was assessed using a forced recognition test of 15 pairs of a true image and a fake image generated by artificial intelligence software.

A 1-way ANOVA revealed no difference in memory accuracy between the three groups (P=.48). Mean memory accuracy was 0.714 (SD 0.125) for the control group, 0.732 (SD 0.117) for the comparison group, and 0.694 (SD 0.155) for the intervention group. However, a repeated-measures ANOVA found that the semantically irrelevant VR experience significantly boosted positive emotions among the intervention group participants (P=.04) and reduced negative feelings among participants in all groups (P<.001).

Our findings suggest that semantically irrelevant VR was effective in changing the emotional states of participants. This implies that a semantically irrelevant VR experience can serve as a quick and affordable way to address psychological reactions after watching a traumatic event. Future research is required to design semantically irrelevant VR content to produce the memory suppression effect.

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT07393776; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07393776

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