Virtual Reality Training for Social Skills in Schizophrenia - Comparison With Cognitive Training

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, it is necessary to 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.

In a previous pilot study, the investigators tested 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. 10 sessions of 1-hour VR intervention were sufficient to engage the target mechanism of social attention and improve negative symptoms. Acceptability and compliance were very high among the participants. In fact, improvements were seen at about 4-5 sessions. Therefore, we used 8 sessions for the R33 phase.

The next phase, supported by a R33 grant compares the VR social skills training with a control condition. This new protocol includes a control condition for the exposure to computerized training across the 8 sessions and incidental exposure to social interactions (i.e. interactions with experimenters twice a week for 4-5 weeks). The control condition consists of commercially available cognitive video games played on the same computer for the same duration as the social VR training condition. This control condition is called Cognitive training game condition.

Conditions

• Schizophrenia
• Schizo Affective Disorder
• Social Skills

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

social VR (virtual reality) training

Social skills game that we developed in the R21 phase will be used across 8 sessions of training in the lab. Each session is about 1 hour long. Participants come to the lab twice a week for 4-5 weeks.

BEHAVIORAL

Cognitive training (control game)

Commercially available cognitive training program will be used to control for the time spent in the lab and associated social interactions as well as the total exposure to computerized games.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Vanderbilt University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Sohee Park, Ph.D. · Vanderbilt University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

SINGLE

Model

CROSSOVER

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

65 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-10-15

Primary Completion

2024-05-30

Completion

2024-05-30

Countries

• United States

Study Locations