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Work-related stress presents a significant impact on work performance and physical health. It has been associated with the onset of a multitude of symptoms that can lead to occupational stress diseases, namely Adjustment Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The literature has evidenced that “exposure therapy” of cognitive-behavioral training (CBT-E) seems to be the most effective technique to manage stress symptoms, including work stress diseases, and several studies have considered Virtual Reality (VR) as an adjuvant tool to exposure-based psychotherapy (CBT-VR) for the treatment of multiple psychiatric disorders. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of CBT with exposure to stressful work scenarios in imaginative (CBT-E) and in immersive virtual reality (CBT-VR) scenarios in a group of workers affected by work-related stress disorders and compare the clinical and physiological outcomes between the two exposure techniques. A long-term goal would be to develop an evidence-based rehabilitation program as a treatment for the reintegration into work of patients affected by these psychiatric disorders.

The children suffering of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present several limitations in social communication and interactive skills. State of the art showed that Virtual Reality (VR) represents a valid alternative to learn social skills in ASD. In particular VR offers the advantage to simulate daily life interaction in a replicable and controlled environment. In this paper, we present a novel methodology to evaluate social competence in ASD based on the immersive VR system, featuring natural interaction. The VR system is based on the theoretical model which aims to evaluate the intersubjective interchange in everyday relationship between autistic population and the surrounding environment. We suggest that this technological setup can be a useful tool to increase social competence in ASD and it can become a sophisticated outcome measurement tool for studying the improvement of social competence.

The surrounding world has a strong impact on the way we feel and perceive the events that happens in daily life. The power of environments to elicit emotions in humans has been widely studied in experimental psychology by using exposure to photographs or real situations. These researches do not reproduce the vividness of events in ordinary life and do not permit to control the situations that happen within. By reproducing a realistic scenario similar to daily life and by controlling the social narratives happening within, Virtual Reality (VR) is a powerful tool to investigate the effect of environments on humans’ feelings and emotions. In this study we have animated the emotional content of a realistic virtual scenario with a dynamic scene in order to introduce a novel approach to investigate the effect of environments in human feeling based on the Emotional Narrative Virtual Environment (ENVE) paradigm. A sample of 36 subjects experimented 3 ENVEs with a Fear, Disgust and Happy emotional content, made to live with a social narratives, in an immersive VR setup. Results showed the ability of ENVE to elicit specific emotional state in participants and corroborate the idea that the ENVE approach can be used in environmental psychology or to treat persons with mental disease.

Virtual Reality experiences featuring realistic Virtual Humans with convincing facial expressions are a useful tool to improve social skill in humans. For this reason several investigations have been carried out on the recognition of virtual avatar emotions, based on dynamic and static facial cues originated by basic emotions developed by Ekman. Dynamism and realism of facial expressions are both important aspects of the process of face-to-face interaction in everyday life. In this paper we present the results of a research aiming at investigating the impact of the combination of dynamic facial expressions corresponding to particular emotions with a high level of realism of virtual faces. A study where we have measured the level of intensity in the correspondence between facial expressions of virtual avatars and emotional stimuli perceived by an observer was carried out on two groups of participants with different expertise in Virtual Reality. Results show a high level of intensity in this correspondence in both groups through the evaluation of two variables: time response and the score assigned to each emotion. We suggest that the use of dynamic virtual avatars offers advantages for studying emotion recognition in a face in that they recreate a realistic stimuli in emotion research.