Advancements in Psychotic Disorder Diagnosis: Virtual Reality for Precision and Clarity
Virtual reality and physiological measurements show promise in improving psychiatric diagnoses, offering objective insights and aiding early interventions.
Watan-Accurate diagnosis remains one of the biggest challenges in psychiatry, with over half of psychiatric patients experiencing a change in diagnosis within 10 years.
Most psychiatric diagnoses rely on patient reports about their symptoms, but many psychiatric disorders share overlapping characteristics. For example, symptoms such as emotional numbness, hallucinations, and cognitive issues can appear in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, making differentiation difficult.
Virtual Reality for Diagnosis
Incorrect diagnoses can lead to inappropriate treatment plans and poor health outcomes, highlighting the need for clear biological indicators that help improve diagnostic accuracy and direct more effective interventions.
In this context, researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark have developed a system that uses “virtual reality” techniques, showing promising potential to enhance the distinction between common psychiatric disorders, paving the way for earlier and more personalized treatments.
The researchers explained that the system integrates virtual reality applications with physiological measurements to explore a more objective approach to identifying different psychiatric disorders. The results were published in the April 1, 2025 issue of the European Neuropsychopharmacology journal. Virtual reality techniques are typically used to create interactive three-dimensional environments that simulate real-life scenarios, where users can interact with the environment using tools like glasses or special helmets. Virtual reality offers an immersive experience, allowing users to engage in various situations as if they were real. It is used in multiple fields such as education, entertainment, and psychotherapy.
Virtual Reality and Physiological Data: A New Frontier in Psychiatric Diagnosis
In this study, virtual reality was used to create immersive social scenarios designed to simulate real emotional situations. The study involved 100 participants, including individuals with bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and schizophrenia, as well as a group of healthy participants. They were exposed to several immersive virtual scenarios designed to provoke emotional and physiological responses, such as watching a video of a crying child, engaging in a café discussion, or experiencing a ride in a cramped elevator.
The system developed by the researchers relies on combining virtual reality applications with physiological measurements, such as electrodermal activity, which indicates changes in skin resistance based on the activity of sweat glands controlled by the nervous system. When the nervous system is over-stimulated, sweating increases, raising the electrical conductivity of the skin, signaling emotional and physiological arousal. These measurements are used in research and psychiatry to objectively assess psychological and emotional interactions, supporting clinical diagnoses, such as distinguishing between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia based on the body’s response to specific situations.
The researchers measured emotional responses and electrodermal activity during these scenarios to identify differences between individuals with various psychiatric disorders. The results showed that participants’ responses systematically differed between diagnostic groups, suggesting that this approach could improve the diagnostic accuracy of psychiatric disorders, which are often difficult to diagnose due to overlapping symptoms among many conditions. For instance, symptoms like emotional blunting, hallucinations, or cognitive issues can appear in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, making it hard to distinguish between them.
Direct Measurement of Responses
Dr. Camilla Miskowiak, a researcher at the Copenhagen Center for Psychiatry at Frederiksberg Hospital in Denmark and a co-author of the study, explains that the virtual reality-based assessment provides a more accurate and objective approach to diagnosing psychiatric disorders.
She added that traditional psychiatric diagnoses rely heavily on patients’ self-reports of their symptoms, which can be influenced by personal interpretation, memory recall difficulties, or reluctance to disclose certain experiences. By using virtual reality scenarios alongside physiological measurements, researchers can provoke and measure emotional and physiological responses in real time, reducing reliance on self-reporting and enhancing diagnostic accuracy. Combining virtual reality scenarios with physiological measurements may also help distinguish between similar psychiatric disorders, an area where psychiatry has long struggled.
