Abstract

BUENO-SANCHEZ, Liliana et al. Virtual Reality as a Treatment for Spider Phobia: A Systematic Review. Psychol. av. discip. [online]. 2019, vol.13, n.1, pp.101-109.  Epub Dec 29, 2020. ISSN 1900-2386.  https://doi.org/10.21500/19002386.4024.

The growing interest that has brought the study of phobias and among them the specific phobia, has given rise to the diverse use of treatments, which include virtual reality as an innovative technique. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of Virtual Reality (VR) as a treatment for spider-specific phobia, through a systematic review of research that has been published in the last 10 years (2008 to 2018) in the Scopus database. The systematic review was carried out under the guidelines of the PRISMA methodology, which were thus excluded; taking into account the search terms in title, summary and keywords, 309 articles were identified, 109 experimental studies were already completed, other specific phobias and other types of technologies were excluded, 10 articles were selected for full-text analysis, including so only 5 articles for the review, which used virtual reality as a treatment. According to the results, evidence was found that suggests that this type of treatment may be relatively effective in addressing this problem, since the results indicate a significant decrease in clinical indicators, but there are also several methodological limitations. It is expected that this systematic review will promote Research that uses virtual reality as a treatment for spider-specific phobia, improving the limitations identified in the study.

Keywords : phobia; specific phobia; arachnophobia; spider; virtual reality.

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