Neuroscientists Reveal Novel Ways to Tackle Your Fears

Fear is an essential element of human survival, allowing us to avoid and respond to dangerous situations. But there are times when constant fear and anxiety can interfere with our ability to function.

Chronic fear and anxiety can negatively impact our mental and physical health, affecting everything from your stomach to your sleep. But new research suggests that modern technology might be able to help people overcome these fears and phobias.

"Virtual reality can change people's ways of thinking and feeling through novel experiences," Masahiko Haruno, a computational social neuroscientist at the Japanese Center for Information and Neural Networks and professor at Osaka University in Japan, told Newsweek. "Research has demonstrated that VR experiences can reduce acrophobia [fear of heights], racial prejudice, and mental barriers in mathematical problem-solving."

In a recent study, Haruno and his team explored how virtual reality could support people with a severe fear of heights by simulating a virtual flight experience. In the experiment, participants were able to control a video of themselves flying over a city.

"The advantage of VR is to allow people to have a sense of control and thereby predict future outcomes to avoid fear through their actions," Haruno said.

Following this activity, the participants were asked to walk a plank in virtual reality. What they found was that participants who had been able to control their flying experience showed a significantly lower fear response than those who had watched the same flying video but with no control over the experience. Their results will be presented at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting on Monday November 13.

However, virtual exposure to fearful stimuli may yield the best results when body movement is also involved. "We could speculate that virtual experiences, when they more closely mimic naturalistic real-life scenarios and contexts, might be more likely to generalize to real-life responses," Ai Koizumi, a researcher in neuroscience and psychology at the Sony Computer Science Labs, told Newsweek.

In a recent study, that will also be presented at Neuroscience 2023, Koizumi and her team trained participants to physically fight against an aggressive stranger in a 3D virtual space. Twenty-four hours after completing the exercise, participants still showed significantly reduced fear responses, which was not seen in participants who had merely watched the training video.

"Our study suggests that the use of one's own body movements to virtually control threatening outcomes could be one tip for combating fear," Koizumi said. "However, there may not be a one-fit-for-all tip that could benefit everyone equally. Our tip of embodiment may apply only to some people such as those who are ready to experience and fight against such virtual threatening scenarios.

"Combating fear is certainly difficult and alleviation procedures often need to be customized for each individual. Thus, we cautiously suggest this tip as one of the future options for complementing interventions."

Both studies demonstrate that learning to face your fears in a controlled, virtual environment may help alleviate chronic stress around fearful situations.

"Using novel technologies such as VR may open a new possibility to revisit the importance of body movements in humans, potentially enhancing the understanding and intervention of fear and anxiety," Koizumi said.