INTRODUCTION This study compares the differential efficacy of three groups of treatments for agoraphobia: paroxetine combined with cognitive-behavioral therapy, paroxetine combined with cognitive-behavioral therapy and virtual reality exposure, and a group with only paroxetine. METHODOLOGY 99 patients with agoraphobia were finally selected. Both combined treatment groups received 11 sessions ...

After major earthquakes, many people suffer from posttraumatic symptoms (PTS) as well as anxiety and distress about ongoing aftershocks. Traditional treatments such as in vivo or imaginal exposure may be of limited applicability for earthquake-related symptoms while others such as cognitive behavioural therapy may not be short enough to deal with the many people needing rapid help after mass di...

This paper reviews the move from virtual reality exposure-based therapy to augmented reality exposure-based therapy (ARET). Unlike virtual reality (VR), which entails a complete virtual environment (VE), augmented reality (AR) limits itself to producing certain virtual elements to then merge them into the view of the physical world. Although, the general public may only have become aware of AR ...

Simulated immersive environments displayed on large screens are a valuable therapeutic asset in the treatment of a range of psychological disorders. Permanent environments are expensive to build and maintain, require specialized clinician training and technical support and often have limited accessibility for clients. Ideally, virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) could be accessible to the b...

Few studies have looked at the experience of exposure therapy (ET) amongst underrepresented populations. African-American (AA) women may be at higher risk for anxiety and experience treatment differently than their Caucasian counterparts. Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRE) is suited to examine differences in treatment experiences because a measure of “presence” exists to quantify the experi...

We propose to illustrate how the PAC-C3D software model makes it possible to share networked 3D Virtual Environments (VE) between heterogeneous 3D viewers written in Java3D and jReality.