Virtual reality for the rehabilitation and prevention of intimate partner violence - From brain to behavior: A narrative review

Abstract

Rehabilitation and prevention strategies to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) have limited effectiveness in terms of improving key risk factors and reducing occurrence. Accumulated experimental evidence demonstrates that virtual embodiment, which results in the illusion of owning a virtual body, has a large impact on people's emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses. This narrative review discusses work that has investigated how embodied perspective - taking in virtual reality has been used as a tool to reduce bias, to enhance recognition of the emotional state of another, and to reduce violent behaviors, in particular in the realm of IPV. Some of the potential neurological mechanisms behind these affective and behavioral changes are also discussed. The process of rehabilitation and prevention is complex and not always effective, but the integration of neuroscience-inspired and validated state-of-the-art technology into the rehabilitation process can make a positive contribution.

Keywords: attitudes; embodiment; empathy; intimate partner violence; perpetrators; prevention; rehabilitation; virtual reality.

Figure 1

Embodiment in different bodies. (A) Screenshots of the child embodiment scene. A. From the first-person perspective of a virtual child. B. From the perspective of a virtual adult body shrunk to the same size as the child. C. Embodiment in a White or Black virtual body instructed to follow the movements of a Tai Chi teacher. (A) Source: Banakou et al. (2013). Reproduced with permission. (B) Source: Banakou et al. (2016) (CC-BY 4.0).

Figure 2

First- versus third-person perspective. (A) The participant looks down towards his body and sees the virtual body. (B) A third-person perspective (with no body) over the scenario, where the female character is looking towards a mirror. (C) The virtual abuser invades the space of the participant who is embodied as the woman. (D) A third person view of the situation shown in (C). Source: Gonzalez-Liencres et al. (2020) (CC-BY 4.0).

Figure 3

In the body and the perspective of the victim. (A) Scheme of the situation in which a male is wearing a head-mounted display to embody a female who is a victim of intimate partner violence. Drawing made by Elias Giannopoulos. (B) Image of a participant using a head-mounted display and immersed in the situation depicted in (A). In an inset, what the participant is viewing from his perspective, including his own hands.

Figure 4

Virtual contents of a scene of intimate partner violence used in Seinfeld et al. (2018). (A) The male participant is embodied as a woman by moving his body and having correct sensorimotor correlations, while seeing the virtual body in the mirror. (B) The participant’s movements are applied to the virtual body. (C) The participant has a task to touch the virtual balls so that they move and see their virtual body movements both directly and in the mirror. (D) The male character enters the scene and starts to criticize the participant. (E) He pushes a telephone from the counter onto the floor while screaming at the participant. (F) He invades the space of the participant. Source: Seinfeld et al. (2018) (CC-BY 4.0).

Figure 5

Studies using virtual environments displaying intimate partner violence that is experimented from two different perspectives. (A) The participant is embodied as a child and witnesses the abuse by the male avatar towards the female (still taken from the experiment described in Seinfeld et al. (2023)). (B) A scenario in a bar where the participant witnesses an attack by a virtual man on his female partner. This is shown from a third-person perspective from behind the virtual body of the participant. Source: Johnston et al. (2021). Reproduced with permission.