Adapted from an article by Dr. Sarah Jenkins, 'Virtually Fearless: Treating Adolescent Anxiety with VR', 14 March 2022, Digital Health Mind.
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) offers an immersive, controllable environment where adolescents can face feared social scenarios under clinical supervision. Opponents suggest it oversimplifies complex social relationships down to pixelated, pre-programmed avatars, while proponents argue it provides a safe, reproducible, and highly standardized treatment option when compared to traditional, unpredictable in-vivo (real-life) exposure.
Evaluate the suggestions you have made in part (d) (where you designed a controlled experiment to test the effectiveness of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy on adolescent social anxiety) with reference to issues and debates you have studied in psychology.
276 exam-style questions on OCR A Level Psychology Debates, covering Nature/nurture, Freewill/determinism, Reductionism/holism, Individual/situational explanations, Usefulness of research, Ethical considerations, Conducting socially sensitive research, and Psychology as a science. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.