Increasing resilience and preventing suicide: training and interventions with a distressed virtual human in virtual reality

Virtual agents have been used as virtual patients for medical training, as well as for mental health training. When the training takes place inside VR the experience is more immersive, which allows for illusions of presence: the illusion that you are co-present with the virtual agent in the same space, and the illusion that the virtual agent is a real human. We have developed 'Daniel', a VR framework, based on a semi-automated virtual agent, which can be used for training for increasing resilience and for suicide prevention, and has the potential of being used as an intervention. Here we report on two different studies aimed at evaluating the framework and the psychological protocols involved. In the first study we trained participants from the general population to develop a resilience plan intervention (RPI) with a distressed virtual agent, and in the second study we trained therapists to use the safety plan intervention (SPI) with a suicidal virtual agent. In both cases we compare the VR sessions with role-playing by human actors. We report that all interventions resulted in an increase in participant self-efficacy in helping others, and we also report results on the possible importance of presence and social presence.