Virtual Reality Therapy: A Means of Reducing Public Speaking Anxiety

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the development of treatments to help people reduce their public speaking anxiety (PSA) in a variety of circumstances. A review of literature suggests that several treatments have been found to be effective in reducing communication apprehension. However, it has not been determined whether Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) has proven to be as effective in reducing individual’s public speaking apprehension (PSA) as other treatments, such as Visualization (Ayres & Hopf, 1985, 1991). Therefore, this study used a Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) system to determine whether students with public speaking anxiety self-reported lower levels of PSA after being exposed to VRT than those students who were exposed to a visualization treatment (Ayres & Hopf, 1985, 1991). Data reveals that PSA students who were exposed to VRT reduced their public speaking apprehension more so than PSA students exposed to visualization (Ayres & Hopf, 1985, 1991). The findings of this study are discussed later in the paper.