EVEN - Effects of VR on Empathy for Nature in Patients with Psychosis and Depressive Disorders

Charite University, Berlin, Germany60 enrolled

Overview

Study group: Experimental study to evaluate empathy, compassion, and nature connectedness before and after an immersive virtual reality experience in patients with depressive disorder, patients with psychotic disorder and healthy control subjects (subjects between 18 and 65 years of age). Primary hypothesis: The increase in nature connectedness explored by virtual body ownership of a tree in VR differs depending on the health condition (schizophrenia, depression, healthy controls).

Study Type

OBSERVATIONAL

Enrollment

Conditions

Depressive Disorder Schizophrenia Healthy Control

Interventions

VR applicationDEVICE

The VR application consists of a software ("Tree") developed as part of a research project at MIT and legally acquired via the HTC store Viveport. Duration of the VR application: approx. 5 min.

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 18 YearsMax age: 65 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * age: 18-65 years * Inpatients and outpatients treated at the Psychiatric University Clinic of the Charité at St. Hedwig Hospital * diagnosis of depressive disorder (ICD-10: F32.X, F33.X) or diagnosis of schizophrenia (F20.X) or healthy controls without psychiatric diagnosis * able to provide written informed consent Exclusion Criteria: * Acute suicidality or danger to others * Primarily treatment-requiring eating disorder * Acute dermatological condition affecting the hands that can distort skin conductivity measurements * Control group: psychiatric or psychosomatic pre-diagnoses (except for the psychiatric active control group), other exclusion diagnoses corresponding to the patient group

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Nature Connectedness

Measurement of Nature Connectedness as a state with the "Inclusion of Nature in Self" (INS)-Questionnaire (Kleespies et al., 2021), pre and post VR exposure.

Time frame: For all groups pre and directly post VR exposure

Secondary Outcomes

Empathy

Evaluation of empathy with the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET; (Dziobek et al., 2008) pre and post VR exposure

Time frame: For all groups pre and directly post VR exposure (within the same session of 1 hour)

Compassion

Evaluation of Compassion (state compassion) pre and post VR exposure with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and five integrated items measuring compassion based on Pfattheicher et al., 2015.

Time frame: For all groups pre and directly post VR exposure (within the same session of 1 hour)

symptom burden

Measured with the PANAS (see above) and with the Visual Analogue Scale (0-10) measuring the burden of the 3 main symptoms, previously specified during assessment of symptom severity (PANSS; (Kay et al., 1987) and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Beck et al., 1961))

Time frame: For the VR study group (patients with depressive disorder) and VR active control group (patients with psychotic disorder) pre and post VR exposure (within the same session of 1 hour)

Embodiment - Feeling of virtual body ownership

Evaluation with a subscale of the Embodiment scale by Ahn et al. (2016) adapted from Slater et al. (2010)

Time frame: post VR exposure for all groups (within the same session of 1 hour)

Spirituality

Evaluation of spirituality using the 4-item short version of the questionnaire "Transpersonales Vertrauen" (Hampel et al., 2019) pre VR exposure.

Time frame: pre VR exposure for all groups

Presence in VR

Scale according to Ahn et al. (Ahn et al., 2016), adapted from the "Spatial Presence scale" by Bailenson et al. (2005) - own German translation adapted to the virtual Amazon forest area (Spangenberger et al., 2024)

Time frame: post VR exposure for all groups (within the same session of 1 hour)

Virtual Reality Simulator Sickness

Cyber Sickness as a potential side effect of VR, measured with the Virtual Reality Sickness Questionnaire (Kim et al., 2018)

Time frame: post VR exposure for all groups (within the same session of 1 hour)

Explorative evaluation of electrodermal activity (EDA)

Explorative evaluation of electrodermal activity (EDA), e.g., skin conductance level (SCL) and skin conductance responses (SCR) in micro siemens during VR exposure

Time frame: during (approx. 5 minutes) VR exposure

EVEN - Effects of VR on Empathy for Nature in Patients with Psychosis and Depressive Disorders

Overview

Conditions

Interventions

Eligibility

Locations (1)

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes