Call for Papers:

Psychology and Virtual Reality
Translational Issues in Psychological Science
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/tps/call-for-papers-virtual-reality

Submission Deadline: July 1, 2020

Translational Issues in Psychological Science is opening submissions for consideration for a special issue titled “Psychology and Virtual Reality.”

Virtual Reality (VR) technology offers new opportunities for clinical research, assessment, and intervention.

Since the mid-1990s, VR-based testing, training, and treatment approaches have been developed by researchers and clinicians that would be difficult, if not impossible, to deliver using traditional methods.

VR affords the opportunity to create highly realistic, interactive, and systematically controllable stimulus environments that users can be immersed in, and interact with, for human performance measurement and training, as well as clinical assessment and intervention.

This “Ultimate Skinner Box” perspective makes VR well matched to experimental- and clinical- psychology research questions.

“Psychology and Virtual Reality” will be published in the seventh year of the journal, due out in September 2021.

The editors will consider manuscripts across a broad area of psychological research using VR with healthy and clinical populations, including, but not limited to, these topics:

• Prevention, assessment and treatment of anxiety disorders, PTSD, and depression
• Cue exposure and relapse prevention for substance use issues
• Acute/chronic pain management and discomfort reduction
• Embodied approaches for body image disturbances treating eating disorders and depression
• Teaching meditation, relaxation, and mindfulness states
• Social skill training with persons on the autism spectrum and other relevant groups
• Functional ability rehabilitation in patients with central nervous system dysfunction
• Study, assessment, and rehabilitation of attention, memory, spatial skills, and other cognitive functions in both clinical and unimpaired populations.
• Use of artificially intelligent virtual humans for clinical training, automated clinical interviewing, and personalized wellness coaching/support.
• General topics on the impact of such technologies to break down barriers to care and potential ethical implications.

Manuscripts submitted to Translational Issues in Psychological Science must be co-authored by at least one psychologist in training (graduate student, postdoctoral fellow), should be written concisely for a broad audience, and focus on the practical implications of the research presented in the manuscript.

For more information about the journal, including detailed instructions to authors, visit the Translational Issues in Psychological Science homepage

Please feel free to forward this correspondence to interested colleagues and the psychologists-in-training with whom you work.

The guest editors welcome questions from authors. For questions regarding this special issue, please send your inquiries to Albert “Skip” Rizzo and Sharon Mozgai.

Albert “Skip” Rizzo, PhD, Special Issue Editor
Sharon Mozgai, MA, Special Issue Associate Editor
Daniel J. Weiss, PhD, Editor-in-Chief