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Virtual Reality Training for Social Skills in Schizophrenia

NCT03128099 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 47

Last updated 2020-03-19

Study results available
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Summary

Social impairments are core features of schizophrenia that lead to poor outcome. Social skills and competence improve quality of life and protect against stress-related exacerbation of symptoms, while supporting resilience, interpersonal interactions, and social affiliation. To improve outcome, we must remediate social deficits. Existing psychosocial interventions are moderately effective but the effort-intensive nature (high burden), low adherence, and weak transfer of skills to everyday life present significant hurdles toward recovery. Thus, there is a dire need to develop effective, engaging and low-burden social interventions for people with schizophrenia that will result in better compliance rates and functional outcome.

The investigators will test the effectiveness of a novel adaptive virtual reality (VR) intervention in improving targeted social cognitive function (social attention, as indexed by eye scanning patterns) in individuals with schizophrenia. VR technology offers a flexible alternative to conventional therapies, with several advantages, including a simplified and low-stress social interaction environment with targeted opportunities to simulate, exercise and reinforce basic elements of social skills in a very wide range of realistic scenarios, and to repeat exposure to naturalistic situations from multiple angles.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Virtual reality social skills training

Participants play a virtual reality video game involving social interactions with various characters ( avatars) at a bus stop, a cafeteria and a grocery store. The games become progressively more complex as the participant improves task performance. Eye tracking patterns are recorded throughout the game to observe the patterns of social attention

Sponsors & Collaborators

Principal Investigators

  • Sohee Park, PhD · Vanderbilt University

  • Nilanjan Sarkar, PhD · Vanderbilt University

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
DOUBLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
21 Years
Max Age
60 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2016-06-30
Primary Completion
2018-06-30
Completion
2018-06-30

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

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Entities

Diseases
Companies

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT03128099 on ClinicalTrials.gov