Grant to use virtual reality to study impact of interpersonal violence on adolescent social functioning

DETROIT - A $900,000 grant to faculty at the Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute (MPSI) at Wayne State University will look at the impact of interpersonal violence on adolescent social functioning and mental health. Researchers will investigate whether exposure to interpersonal violence can sensitize adolescents to react fearfully in common social situations and to interpret unclear social situations as threatening. Teens with this bias in perception can struggle to form trusting relationships and be at higher risk for feelings of isolation, anxiety and depression.

Using innovative virtual reality (VR) methods, researchers will assess teens' physiological, mental and emotional responses to social challenges to identify patterns of fear learning and threat perception that could be modified. Findings will guide the development of a low-cost, VR-based intervention available in community settings to help teens build social skills in a safe and realistic environment.

The three-year grant from the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, "Phenotyping Adolescent Threat Reactivity: Integrating Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms to Create Ecologically Valid and Accessible Interventions," will be led by principal investigator Dr. Valerie Simon, a professor of psychology jointly appointed to the WSU Department of Psychology and MPSI. Co-investigators are Dr. Seth Norrholm, translational neuroscientist in the WSU School of Medicine, and MPSI affiliated faculty members Dr. Tanja Jovanovic and Dr. Ty Partridge.

Adolescence is a key time to study social functioning and introduce interventions. During this time, teens learn to resolve conflict, manage strong emotions and balance their own needs against the needs of others. "They spend a lot of time trying to form and sustain peer relationships," Simon said. "This is important because strong relationships are critical to mental health."

The team will investigate whether youth who have been exposed to interpersonal violence:

1. Show increased sensitivity to common social challenges. Research suggests that persons with a history of trauma develop different patterns of fear learning and can feel threatened in situations that do not provoke fear in others.

2. Are prone to interpreting ambiguous or emotionally challenging social stimuli as threatening.

3. Can be helped to more effectively engage with peers through interventions to desensitize them while strengthening social skills.

Virtual reality headsets can engage users in carefully designed, personalized situations while allowing researchers to measure physiological changes like heart rate and startle response. "Capturing the body's physiological response can help us determine which children might be at

risk for mental health problems," Jovanovic explained. "Anxiety and posttraumatic stress symptoms, for example, are related to heightened fear responses in trauma survivors."

One possible virtual scenario has the teen participant post fliers in a school hallway while walking past students who are whispering. The scenario causes them to ask whether they are whispering about the teen or discussing something completely unrelated. Measures of heart rate and skin conductance can help determine participants' levels of arousal or discomfort triggered by their perceptions of the situation.

"Instead of relying on adolescents' ability to tell us how they might respond to hypothetical social situations, we are using virtual reality to engage them in real-time challenging but age-typical social situations," Simon said. "In this way, adolescents can connect their thoughts and feelings about these experiences to physiological measures in ways that give us a more complete picture of their threat sensitivity."

Results from this project will inform a later phase of the study involving feedback from community agencies like the Boys and Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan to determine effective social skills interventions and how to offer them. The team could then create VR-based skills training offered through community partners for maximum reach and sustainability.

Virtual reality interventions offer a long list of benefits when working with adolescents. VR is engaging, immersive, portable, scalable and interactive. "They can also be personalized," Simon said. "And importantly they are free of stigma and judgement, a critical asset when working to improve mental health in vulnerable young people."

The Tiny Blue Dot Foundation is a 501(c)(3) funding and managing investigations of consciousness. The foundation funds rigorous, empirical, statistically valid, and sound research that allows children, teenagers and adults to understand that the reality they experience is a construct of their mind and amenable to change.