Adolescent Responses to Varying Environments in Virtual Reality Simulations

University of Southern California

Status: Completed

Conditions: Residential Characteristics; Emotions; Stress, Physiological; Stress, Psychological

Treatments: Other: Virtual reality

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other; NIH

Identifiers

NCT04465240

262625

1R21HD099596-01 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

UP-19-00205 (Other Identifier)

Details and patient eligibility

About

The objective of this study, named THRIVE (The Research In Virtual Environments Study), is to test hypotheses for how neighborhood environments influence stress and emotion, as a mechanism by which they may influence health. Neighborhood environments may have both acute influences on stress-related processes, but also may have lifespan effects due to the chronic, cumulative effects of repeated exposures and the long-term toll of adapting to adverse neighborhood environments. However, assessing neighborhood influences on stress and emotion is methodologically challenging. This study develops such a novel, alternative approach to address these questions by deploying a virtual reality (VR) based model of neighborhood disadvantage and affluence that creates an immersive experience approximating the experience of being in different neighborhoods. In this study, this model will be applied to understand neighborhood effects in a diverse sample of adolescents (n = 130) from a range of disadvantaged and affluent neighborhoods. The proposed study will employ a randomized experiment (n = 65 per condition), with online questionnaires and a single study session, to determine (a) if virtual exposure to neighborhood disadvantage elicits differences in emotion and stress reactivity; (2) if growing up in a disadvantaged neighborhood results in habituation or sensitization to different neighborhood characteristics; and (3) if chronic stress results in habituation or sensitization to different neighborhood characteristics. This research will develop an innovative methodology that will help establish the role that neighborhoods may play in eliciting stress as well as the processes of adaptation to chronic stress and chronic neighborhood exposures. In addition, it will help establish a method that can be utilized more broadly to study contextual and social environmental influences on psychological and biological risk in adolescence.

Enrollment: 107 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 14 to 17 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• English speaking
• Are able to use a dominant hand for joystick manipulation and a non- dominant hand for physiological measurements,
• Are in good physical and mental health, with no self-reported history of hypertension, cardiovascular disease (CVD) or CVD treatment (with associated medication list indicative of treatments that result in exclusion),
• Have hair at least 1cm in length based on self-report to be able to provide a hair sample.

Exclusion criteria

• Pregnant, by self-report

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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107 participants in 2 patient groups

Virtual reality simulation of neighborhood disadvantage

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will attend one study session. They will watch a video during a baseline rest period. Participants will be assigned to navigate and explore the virtual neighborhood representative of disadvantage they were assigned to. Then they will watch a video again during a recovery period.

Treatment:

Other: Virtual reality

Virtual reality simulation of neighborhood affluence

Active Comparator group

Description:

Participants will attend one study session. They will watch a video during a baseline rest period. Participants will be assigned to navigate and explore the virtual neighborhood, representative of affluence they were assigned to. Then they will watch a video again during a recovery period.

Treatment:

Other: Virtual reality