Abstract

HAYDU, Verônica Bender; KOCHHANN, Joseani  and  BORLOTI, Elizeu. Virtual reality exposure therapy strategies: a review discussed under the behavior-analytic perspective. Psicol. clin. [online]. 2016, vol.28, n.3, pp. 15-34. ISSN 0103-5665.

The virtual reality technology seems to bring advantages to the psychotherapeutic interventions of anxiety disorders like phobias. This paper reviews the literature about virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) of five forms of phobias (agoraphobia, arachnophobia, claustrophobia, katsaridaphobia, fear of driving), describes the therapeutic procedures, and compared them with procedures used in behavioral-analytic psychotherapy. A search using the keywords therapy, virtual reality, phobia, was performed using the Boolean operator AND, from 2006 to 2015. The studies that reported the therapeutic procedure of the five phobias specified were eight of agoraphobia, 10 of acrophobia, one of claustrophobia, two of katsaridaphobia, and two of fear of driving. The treatment procedures consisted of preprogramed pretreatment sessions, virtual reality exposure, and follow-up. Most of them (22 of 23 studies) reported a fixed number of therapeutic sessions, and in 18 of them, the exposure hierarchy was preprogrammed. The results show that VRET and analytical-behavioral therapy have similarity in basic structure and differences in fixing or not exposure hierarchies and conducting or not functional analysis of the behaviors.

Keywords : virtual reality; therapy; phobia; VRET; behavior analysis.

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