An Affordances-Based Approach and Scoping Review of Virtual Reality Applications in Forensic Behavioral and Mental Health Assessment and Treatment

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) offers plentiful opportunities for behavioral and mental health assessment and treatment, such as overcoming spatial restrictions, increasing treatment motivation, and reducing participant risk. We examine these opportunities through the lens of ‘affordances’, which refers to the specific possibilities a technology offers when users interact with it. This lens provides a frame of reference that can help researchers better understand and exploit the opportunities VR offers for the design of assessments and treatments, boost their effectiveness, and provide a shared vocabulary across disciplines. We illustrate the utility of this approach with a scoping review of VR applications in forensic settings. Most of the 25 studies that were included used multiple VR affordances. While all studies employed transportation (100%), i.e., sensory immersion in a virtual environment that differs from the current physical environment, fewer utilized transformation (30%), i.e., user-embodiment in avatars with characteristics that differ from their own. The proposed affordances-based approach offers a transdiagnostic and user-centered approach to guide development and design of VR-based assessment and treatment across diverse mental health domains. It provides a shared conceptual approach for the organization of intervention components as well as for communication between stakeholders, facilitating the conversion of an idea into a full intervention.