Overcoming Phobias Using Virtual Reality

ByABC News
November 17, 2003, 4:32 PM

Nov. 20, 2003 -- Miss Muffet no longer fears that spider that sat down beside her in that famous nursery rhyme. In fact, she's become downright fond of it.

That's because Miss Muffet, in this case, is a real person with a real phobia of spiders, and she's learned how to conquer that fear with one of the newest gadgets in the psychologist's toolbox virtual reality.

But this isn't your grandfather's virtual reality. This one comes equipped with a fuzzy, creepy replica of a beast called a Guyana bird-eating tarantula in the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory.

In addition to the three-dimensional helmets worn in your run-of-the-mill virtual reality lab, the Washington experimenters have added tactile effects in the form of a fuzzy object that feels just like a spider, and even scary music straight from the movie Psycho.

The point of all that, says psychologist Hunter Hoffman, leader of the project, is to make the simulated experience as real as possible.

Just simply adding the hand-held fuzzy object to the visuals seen through the 3-D goggles worn by the participants made virtual reality far more effective than it had been with just the visual effects, he says.

"It was dramatically significant," Hoffman says. "It doubled the effectiveness."

The proof, he says, lies in participants like Miss Muffet, which, of course is not her real name. She had been so frightened of spiders that she couldn't even approach a cage with a spider sealed inside, and past clinical efforts to help her had failed.

But by the time she completed the experiment in Hoffman's lab, she could hold a live tarantula in her hand, and she did that for more than 30 minutes.

Furthermore, her fear has not returned, Hoffman says, supporting a growing conviction in the clinical community that virtual reality can be a very helpful tool in fighting phobias.

The research also supports Hoffman's contention that the more real the encounter is, the more effective the treatment. That's because in order for the treatment to work it has to evoke the anxiety and fear that would be expected in the real world, and adding additional sensory experiences, like touch, makes the experience more intense.