Training Mentalizing Skills In Virtual Reality: An Experimental Treatment For Children

Mentalization is the ability to understand behaviors as underlying mental states such as thoughts, emotions, and motivations. Mentalization development is considered complete between 8 to 12 years old. The possibility to work on this competence may have a substantial role in preventing or intervening in child psychopathology. Mentalizing Skills (MS) are activated in a relational context. This contribution's main objective is to suggest developing a Virtual Reality (VR) tool to assess socio-emotional abilities in children and train mentalization skills (MS) in an immersive environment. More specifically, we aim to test longitudinal variations (before and after intervention) of (1) socioemotional problems and (2) emotion regulation strategies (expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal). Participants will be assessed with the Roberts-2 test using a VR app to assess MS using a head-tracked Head Mounted Display (HMD). The new app will assess the participants' ability to make inferential thoughts about others' states of mind, and a validated device will record Heart Rate Variability as a measure of emotion regulation. This new protocol will provide a reliable and engaging way to assess and train MS in an ecological environment via an agile technology-based approach, offering clinicians valuable insights into the children's skills/deficiencies, useful for prevention and clinical intervention.