Effect of Assertiveness Training on Social Anxiety in a Virtual Reality Setting: A Pilot

Not Applicable

• Conditions: Social Anxiety Disorder; Mental Health - Anxiety

• Registration Number: ACTRN12619001154190
• Lead Sponsor: ISN Psychology

Brief Summary

Not available

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Results First Posted: 1900-01-01
• Study Start: 2019-08-19
• Last Update Posted: 26 August 2019

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: ot yet recruiting
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 34

Inclusion Criteria

Participants with social anxiety will be recruited from the community using a number of inclusionary and exclusionary criteria. Participants must be aged 18 to 65. To ensure a fully immersive virtual reality experience, individuals will be required to self-identified as being proficient in English in order to comprehend the self-training module and dialogues, have normal or corrected to normal vision, as well as normal hearing.

In addition, a number of screening tools will be used to determine participant eligibility, details as follows:

Motion Sickness Screening
- The MSSQ-R will be used to screen out individuals susceptible to motion sickness or simulation sickness. Individuals scoring 13 and above will be excluded due to higher chance of experiencing simulation sickness.

Social Anxiety
- The LSAS-SR will be used to measure participants’ social anxiety, Rytwinski et al. (2009) indicated a cutoff score of 60 suggest the presence of social anxiety disorder. Therefore, individuals scoring below 60 will be excluded from the study.

Assertiveness
- In order to test the effectiveness of the assertiveness training module, individuals scoring 20 and above on the RAS will be excluded due to high levels of assertiveness or aggressiveness.

Exclusion Criteria

The virtual environment can elicit discomfort, which may potentially confound the results and create transient harm to potential participants. There is also a theoretical risk that VR will induce seizure. Therefore individuals with a history of epilepsy, seizures, motion sickness or simulation sickness will be excluded. The current study also excludes individuals receiving concurrent psychotherapy targeting unassertiveness due to the potential of confounding results.

Study & Design

• Study Type: Interventional
• Study Design: Not specified