VRMI was featured in an article on Polygon.com titled ‘Using Virtual Reality to Desensitize Troops’. To view the article, click here.

Dr. Brenda K. Wiederhold was featured in International Review of the Armed Forces Medical Services in an article titled “A Continuum of Care: Virtual Reality as Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Other Pain Syndromes. To read the full article, click here. International Review of the Armed Forces Medical Services

Dr. Mark Wiederhold was featured in the International Review of the Armed Forces Medical Services for his article “A Continuum of Care: Pre-Deployment Medical and Tactical Stress Inoculation Training Using Virtual Reality.” You can read the fulla rticle here: International Review of the Armed Forces Medical Services.

For the full report, click VR Museum.

To download the article, click here:

Women just as easily hooked on online porn as men.

To view the webpage, click here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/11016874/Sex-Women-just-as-easily-hooked-on-online-porn-as-men.html

To download the article, click here:

Facebook users risk psychological damage spying on ex lovers

To view the article in a webpage, click here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9556020/Facebook-users-risk-psychological-damage-spying-on-ex-lovers.html

June 17, 2014

Members of  Interactive Media Institute and Virtual Reality Medical Institute were honored to be in attendance at the Sunset Parade in Washington DC to honor Travis Manion.  Guests of Honor at the event included Colonel Thomas Manion (USMC, Retired), Chairman Emeritus Travis Manion Foundation and Ms. Ryan Borek, President, Travis Manion Foundation.  The event was hosted by Lieutenant General William Faulkner, Deputy Commandant, Installations and Logistics.

About Travis Manion:

1st Lt. Travis Manion made the ultimate sacrifice in the Al Anbar province of Iraq. He, his fellow Marines, and Iraqi Army counterparts were ambushed while searching a suspected insurgent house. 1st Lt. Manion led the counterattack against the enemy forces. He was fatally wounded by an enemy sniper while aiding and drawing fire away from his wounded comrades. His selfless actions allowed every member of his patrol to survive. For his actions, he was awarded the Silver Star and Bronze Star with Valor.

Shortly after the death of 1st Lt. Travis Manion in Iraq on April 29, 2007, the fallen Marine’s mother, the late Janet Manion, founded the Travis Manion Foundation to assist our nation’s veterans and families of the fallen. TMF engages with veterans and families of the fallen in all stages of their personal journeys and offers them unique opportunities to empower them to achieve their goals. TMF believes that the best way to honor the fallen is by challenging the living. TMF challenges veterans and survivors to lead the “If Not Me, Then Who…” movement and inspire others to continue the service to community and country exemplified by the nation’s fallen heroes.

At the International Association of CyberPsychology, Training & Rehabilitation’s (iACToR) 19th Annual CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference (CYPSY19), awards are presented to pay tribute to individuals for their outstanding achievements.  Past recipients include Professor Dr. Stephane Bouchard (2005), Professor Dr. Brenda K. Wiederhold (2006), Professor Dr. Giuseppe Riva (2007), Professor Dr. Cristina Botella (2008), Professor Dr. Hunter Hoffman (2009), Professor Dr. Sun I. Kim (2010) and Professor Dr. Mark D. Wiederhold (2011), Professor Dr. Mariano Alcaniz (2012) and Professor Richard M. Satava. (2013).

To celebrate more than a decade of exciting advances in cybertherapy as well as the growth of the CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference itself, we are proud to announce Prof Andrea Gaggioli as the 10th Annual CyberTherapy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. This award, the highest given by our community, has a tradition of honoring a person who has demonstrated outstanding lifetime achievements in the fields of advanced technologies and healthcare.

Prof. Gaggioli is Research Professor of General Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy; Senior Researcher of the Interactive Communication and Ergonomics of New Technologies – ICE-NET – Lab. at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, and Deputy Head Researcher at the Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Laboratory – ATN-P Lab., Istituto Auxologico Italiano. For over ten years, Prof. Gaggioli has investigated the potential role of pervasive technologies in promoting mental and physical wellbeing. His involvement with those research areas has led to the co-authoring of over fifty articles in refereed journals, including these papers published in “Science”: (i) Gaggioli A., Riva G., Working the Crowd, Science. 2008 Sep 12;321(5895):1443; (ii) Gorini A, Gaggioli A, Riva G. Virtual Worlds, Real Healing. Science. 2007 Dec 7;318(5856):1549. For his scientific work, Prof. Gaggioli received several international acknowledgements, including the 2005 Annual Prize of the European Academy of Rehabilitation Medicine (http://www.aemr.eu/). In addition, he has recently completed coordinating the European Commission funded INTERSTRESS project (Interreality in the Management and Treatment of Stress-Related Disorders). This STREP project explored the potential of a new human-computer paradigm – “Interreality” – for the management of psychological stress.

The aim of the Clinical Cyberpsychology New Investigator Award is to reward the presentation of strong methodological studies at the CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking conference. This year we are delighted announce Dr. Fillipo La Pagaila as the conference award recipient. Dr. La Pagaila is an Italian psychologist who received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorder at the University of Palermo with the experimental thesis on “Assessment of Executive Functions in Patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by Virtual Reality.” Currently Dr. La Pagaila works at the Department of Experimental Biomedicine and Clinical Neuroscience, University of Palermo, Italy.

The main area of interest for Dr. La Pagaila is the application of Virtual Reality and media technologies within the clinical context. His current work includes the “Assessment of Executive Functions in Patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by NeuroVirtual Reality and the “Cognitive Rehabilitation in Schizophrenic Patients by Virtual Reality”. In addition, since 2004 Dr. La Pagaila has been planning and conducting educational robotics laboratories in primary and secondary school which are aimed at the improvement of mathematical logical thought and problem-solving strategies.

Dr. La Pagaila is the author of several scientific papers published in the area of methods and psychology assessment tools and the use of virtual reality and the Internet in medicine and  training. In 2013, La Paglia received “The 2013 Young Minds Research Award and since 2008, he has participated at each CYPSY conference.

To showcase outstanding achievements in a student poster submission to the CYPSY Conference, the Young Minds Research Awards, sponsored by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Publishers, are presented to those projects judged to have the greatest potential to contribute to the innovative field of cyberpsychology, cybertherapy, training, & rehabilitation.

We are proud to announce our two poster winners, Jonathan Shalom from Israel and the lab of Soledad Quero from Spain. Mr. Shalom is currently a Ph.D candidate from Ben-Gurion University in Israel and presented his work ‘Social Anxiety and Physiological Arousal in Computer Mediated vs. Face-to-Face CommPatients’. Soledad Quero and her students from the Universitat Jaume I in Spain presented two posters: Expectations and Satisfaction with Traditional CBT versus CBT supported by ICTs & An Online Self-Applied Program for Drug Use Prevention in Adolescents (PREVEN-TIC FORMATIVO): the Professionals’ Assessment.

Congratulations and thank you to the winners for their dedication and passion in moving CYPSY forward.

Brenda K Wiederhold, President of Virtual Reality Medical Institute (Belgium) and Interactive Media Institute (California) together with Stéphane Bouchard, Professor, Université du Québec en Outaouais are pleased to announce the publication of their most recent book by Springer:  Advances in Virtual Reality and Anxiety Disorders.  The book is part of a series on Anxiety and Related Disorders, edited by Martin M. Antony, Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. The interactive computer-generated world of virtual reality has been successful in treating phobias and other anxiety-related conditions, in part because of its distinct advantages over traditional in vivo exposure. Yet many clinicians still think of VR technology as it was in the 1990s–bulky, costly, and technically difficult–with little knowledge of its evolution toward more modern, evidence-based, practice-friendly treatment.

These updates, and their clinical usefulness, are the subject of Advances in Virtual Reality and Anxiety Disorders, a timely guidebook geared toward integrating up-to-date VR methods into everyday practice. Introductory material covers key virtual reality concepts, provides a brief history of VR as used in therapy for anxiety disorders, ad­dresses the concept of presence, and explains the side effects, known as cybersickness, that affect a small percentage of clients. Chapters in the book’s main section detail current techniques and review study findings for using VR in the treatment of:

 

·                     Claustrophobia.

·                     Panic disorder, agoraphobia, and driving phobia.

·                     Acrophobia and aviophobia.

·                     Arachnophobia.

·                     Social phobia.

·                     Generalized anxiety disorder and OCD.

·                     PTSD.

·                     Plus clinical guidelines for establishing a VR clinic.

 

An in-depth framework for effective (and cost-effective) therapeutic innovations for entrenched problems, Advances in Virtual Reality and Anxiety Disorders will find an engaged audience among psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and mental health counselors.

Please visit http://www.springer.com/psychology/book/978-1-4899-8022-9 to find out more about this new publication or to order your paper copy or eBook.