Workplace Mental State Monitoring during VR-Based Training for Offshore Environment

Electroencephalographic oscillations of alpha and beta rhythms during phrase-guessing procedure

Phrases-guessing is one of the essential reasoning abilities in problem solving for human beings. However, it is still an open question about why individuals perform differently during the same reasoning task. In this study, we utilized a bilingual phrase-guessing task to explore the neural activities under the individually different performances with electroencephalography. Participants who had no knowledge of Greek were required to guess the meaning of a Greek phrase (long or short in length) by making an either-or selection as to which translation-equivalent Chinese word corresponds to Greek word. Names of color were used as experimental stimuli for which two Chinese words denoted the same color with one as a conventional color name and the other as a novel color name. The experiment yielded length of phrases (long vs. short) and novelty of phrases (novel vs. conventional) as variables. The behavioral results revealed significant length-by-novelty interaction on the number of selections. However, neither main effects nor interactive effects were found on response time. Further, the amplitude spectrums of high alpha rhythm, low alpha rhythm, and low beta rhythm during the task were positively associated with the participants' number of selections for a long Greek phrase with a novel and complex Chinese phrase (LNc) and a short Greek phrase with a conventional Chinese phrase (SCo), while negatively correlated with the response time of selections for LNc and SCo. Our findings suggested that the consistency between participants' behavior and electrophysiological oscillations (alpha and beta bands) could be employed as biomarkers for decoding the phrase-guessing procedure.

Review of Psychophysiological and Psychotherapeutic Studies of Stress Using Virtual Reality Technologies

This review addresses the use of virtual reality technologies in the psychophysiology and psychotherapy of stress. Studies using virtual reality both to introduce subjects into a state of stress and to help reduce stress reactions are reviewed. Methods developed for treating patients suffering from stress-related disorders (in particular, PTSD and phobias) are described. In many cases, reductions in stress reactions with the help of virtual reality systems are achieved not only at the self-report (experiential) level, but also at the level of central and peripheral nervous system measures. This allows virtual reality to be regarded as a modern, inexpensive, and effective method, firstly, for introducing subjects into a state of stress with the aim of testing various hypotheses in psychophysiology and, secondly, to reduce stress reactions.

Resilience-Building for Mental Health among Early Childhood Educators: A Systematic Review and Pilot-Study towards an EEG-VR Resilience Building Intervention

Resilience is a key factor that reflects a teacher's ability to utilize their emotional resources and working skills to provide high-quality teaching to children. Resilience-building interventions aim to promote positive psychological functioning and well-being. However, there is lack of evidence on whether these interventions improve the well-being or mental health of teachers in early childhood education (ECE) settings. This review examined the overall effectiveness of resilience-building interventions conducted on teachers working in the ECE field. A systematic approach is used to identify relevant studies that focus on resilience-building in countering work stress among early childhood educators. Findings from this review observed a preference of group approaches and varying durations of interventions. This review highlights the challenges of the group approach which can lead to lengthy interventions and attrition amongst participants. In addition to the concerns regarding response bias from self-report questionnaires, there is also a lack of physiological measures used to evaluate effects on mental health. The large efforts by 11 studies to integrate multiple centres into their intervention and the centre-based assessment performed by four studies highlight the need for a centre-focused approach to build resilience among teachers from various ECE centres. A pilot study is conducted to evaluate the feasibility of an integrated electroencephalography-virtual reality (EEG-VR) approach in building resilience in teachers, where the frontal brain activity can be monitored during a virtual classroom task. Overall, the findings of this review propose the integration of physiological measures to monitor changes in mental health throughout the resilience-building intervention and the use of VR as a tool to design a unique virtual environment.

A High-Density EEG Study Investigating VR Film Editing and Cognitive Event Segmentation Theory

This paper introduces a cognitive psychological experiment that was conducted to analyze how traditional film editing methods and the application of cognitive event segmentation theory perform in virtual reality (VR). Thirty volunteers were recruited and asked to watch a series of short VR videos designed in three dimensions: time, action (characters), and space. Electroencephalograms (EEG) were recorded simultaneously during their participation. Subjective results show that any of the editing methods used would lead to an increased load and reduced immersion. Furthermore, the cognition of event segmentation theory also plays an instructive role in VR editing, with differences mainly focusing on frontal, parietal, and central regions. On this basis, visual evoked potential (VEP) analysis was performed, and the standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography algorithm (sLORETA) traceability method was used to analyze the data. The results of the VEP analysis suggest that shearing usually elicits a late event-related potential component, while the sources of VEP are mainly the frontal and parietal lobes. The insights derived from this work can be used as guidance for VR content creation, allowing VR image editing to reveal greater richness and unique beauty.