Research
SFU SIAT researcher uses virtual reality to help teen mental health
A Simon Fraser University (SFU) researcher is using virtual reality (VR) to help teens regulate their emotions and is using their feedback to help design and develop better technologies for psychologists.
Alexandra Kitson, a post-doctoral researcher in the Tangible Embodied Child-Computer Interaction Lab, supervised by Alissa N. Antle, in SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology, is presenting five papers with co-authors this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘24) in Oahu, Hawaii.
Unlike, say psychology, where studies are often published in journals, in the field of human-computer interaction the top venue for publication is at the annual CHI Conference, ensuring results have impact in a timely way.
Two of the papers, which Kitson will be presenting at CHI '24, investigate the use of digital technologies to support the development of youth's emotion regulation skills. Working with youth in the local community, Kitson and her team explore ways that they could design immersive environments, such as virtual reality to enhance emotion-regulation training for teens. Emotion regulation is how people manage emotions, for example by purposely changing how they think about a feeling or experience to reframe it. The ability to use emotion regulation strategies during and after emotionally laden experiences is correlated with good mental health.
“We’ve seen a lot of clinical and psychology interventions, which are great and amazing and work, but teens still find it difficult to learn and practice managing their emotions and some interventions are not appealing or motivating for them,” says Kitson. “So that’s where technology and virtual reality could potentially come in. We think VR could add "realness" to training and possibly motivate them to keep coming back.”
The advantage of using VR in emotion regulation training, she explains, is that it can simulate realistic scenarios that can evoke visceral, emotional responses, compared to roleplaying or reading about scenarios. VR and artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to help people reframe their thoughts.
For example, managing feelings during public speaking is difficult. Kitson explains, public speaking can be scary, but in a VR public speaking environment an AI character can prompt you in real time to help you reframe thoughts of failure so you can practice keeping your cool. Then when the time comes to manage your emotions in real life, you'll be more prepared.
'I like the excitement of cutting-edge tech and being the first to explore something, or think about what it looks like in five, 10, 20 years and trying to design prototypes or the possibilities so we can be better prepared in the future.'
Alexandra Kitson
As part of her research approach, she works with a diverse group of teens of different socioeconomical and ethnic backgrounds, and neurodiversity, to co-design possible uses of these technologies for emotion regulation skills development training. The research is funded by NSERC.
Kitson is committed to a community-based approach to research. “It goes back to that saying, ‘Nothing for me, without me,’” Kitson says. “They are the ones who are going to be using it in the end. I think it’s important to be able to involve teens and empower them to be able to contribute and then make something with us, so they can be like, ‘We want this kind of experience. We want it to be in this place, at this time. And this is how we want to access it.’”
Participants included a high-school drama class with students of low socioeconomic status and different learning abilities. Compared with students of high socioeconomic status, these students are typically hard to reach. Getting their perspectives can be a challenge but offers unique insights and learnings. In co-design sessions, students shared personal and emotionally laden lived experiences and then brainstormed how VR experiences could help them learn to manage their emotions and respond to their lived experiences in more adaptive ways.
Among the revelations of the study was that teens have difficulties selecting adaptive ways to manage their negative thoughts and feelings during emotionally charged situations. One idea the team envisioned would be to leverage the unique opportunity in VR to expose adolescents to stressful situations where supports are embedded into a 3D spatialized environment, e.g., audio and visual prompts, while also incorporating gamified components for teens to learn and develop different emotion regulation skills.
Kitson is also presenting three other works at the CHI '24 conference. One paper is about asymmetric gameplay in XR, where one person is wearing a VR headset and the others aren’t. Another paper explores how AI-generated 3D content in VR could enhance dream reflection. Finally, she will co-facilitate a workshop on physiological signals in interactive systems.
“I like the excitement of cutting-edge tech and being the first to explore something, or think about what it looks like in five, 10, 20 years and trying to design prototypes or the possibilities so we can be better prepared in the future.”
Kitson acknowledges the collaborative nature of the VR Youth and Mental Health research project. Co-authors include Alissa N. Antle, Sadhbh Kenny, Ashu Adhikari, Kenneth Karthik, Artun Cimensel and Melissa Chan from the TECI lab at SFU and Petr Slovák (Kings College London), and Katherine Isbister (University of California at Santa Cruz).