title: Virtual Reality in the Assessment and Treatment of Weight-Related Disorders.
abstract: Virtual Reality (VR) has, for the past two decades, proven to be a useful adjunctive tool for both assessment and treatment of patients with eating disorders and obesity. VR allows an individual to enter scenarios that simulate real-life situations and to encounter food cues known to trigger his/her disordered eating behavior. As well, VR enables three-dimensional figures of the patient's body to be presented, helping him/her to reach an awareness of body image distortion and then providing the opportunity to confront and correct distortions, resulting in a more realistic body image and a decrease in body image dissatisfaction. In this paper, we describe seminal studies in this research area.
authors.affiliation: 1 Virtual Reality Medical Center , San Diego, California.|2 Virtual Reality Medical Institute , Brussels, Belgium .
authors.forename: Brenda K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Wiederhold
authors.affiliation: 3 Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore , Milan, Italy .|4 Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Laboratory, Istituto Auxologico Italiano , Milan, Italy .
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Riva
authors.affiliation: 5 University of Barcelona , Barcelona, Spain .
authors.forename: José
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gutiérrez-Maldonado
mesh_terms: D001828:Body Image / Q000523:psychology; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000523:psychology; D001068:Feeding and Eating Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D005260:Female; D005502:Food; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D063367:Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy / Q000379:methods*