Skip to main content
OpenTrials
Completed

NCT Number: NCT07393776

Effects of Semantically Irrelevant Virtual Reality Experience on Memory and Emotion

First responders at the Federal, State and local level are those on the front lines of providing support to their communities during an emergency or a disaster. Their work domains are emergency public security, firefighting, law enforcement, emergency response, and emergency medical care. Due to the inherent characteristics of the jobs they perform, they are constantly exposed to very stressful, demanding and dangerous work environments. Such an exposure often leads to mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). More than 80 percent of first responders experience traumatic events on their job duty. Various efforts to treat about trauma have been made to address the first responders' mental health. However, existing interventions are not directly targeted at the causes of mental health problems, which is the memory of the adverse events. The objective the proposed research is to investigate the effect of immersive virtual reality (VR) experience on the memory of an adverse event (e.g., fire).

Completed

Looking for future studies?

Notify Me

Key information

Conditions

Intervention Group Behavior Comparison Group Control Group Personal Satisfaction Psychological Well-Being

Age range

18 year and older

Sex eligibility

All sexes

Study type

Interventional

Phase

Not applicable

Primary location

Industrial, Manufacturing, & Systems Engineering Department

Lubbock, Texas, 79409, United States

About this study

Background: First responders, such as firefighters, experience significant mental health issues due to the high-stress nature of their work. Existing mental health interventions, such as meditation and debriefing, despite their benefits, do not target cognitive processing of traumatic events such as memory and emotion.

Objective: This work aims to examine effects of semantically irrelevant virtual reality (VR) content to intervene in the retrieval of an adverse event memory and its associated emotions. Cognitive models of posttraumatic stress disorder posit that exposure to stimuli that are similar to a previous trauma acts as a trigger for retrieval of the associated memory and bodily reaction (eg, elevated heart rate). This work uses semantically irrelevant VR as an intervention to interrupt the retrieval of the traumatic memory by placing a participant in a VR environment that has a distant semantic connection to the trauma.

Methods: A total of 107 participants recruited from a large public university in Texas was randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: control (n=33), comparison (n=37), and intervention (n=37). In stage 1, participants in all groups watched a short video of an actual severe house fire to create a traumatic event memory. In stage 2, the control group stayed seated without doing anything, the comparison group read a paragraph about the Egyptian Ocean as semantically irrelevant follow-up information, and the intervention group watched a 360° VR video of the Egyptian Ocean that features opposite attributes to the fire (eg, blue water vs red fire, cool water vs hot fire). The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, which has 10 items for positive emotions (eg, attentive and excited) and 10 items for negative emotions (eg, scared and distressed), was administered after each of the two stages. In stage 3, the memory accuracy of the house fire video was assessed using a forced recognition test of 15 pairs of a true image and a fake image generated by artificial intelligence software.

Who can participate

Healthy volunteers accepted: Yes

Only the study team can determine whether someone qualifies for participation.

Inclusion criteria

  • aged at least 18 years
  • currently enrolled at the university

Exclusion criteria

  • under 18 years
  • not currently enrolled at the university

Treatment and study plan

Watching VR video

Other

Participants watch 360-degree VR video of underwater diving 5 minutes after they watched the fire video.

Reading text

Other

Participants read text paragraphs regarding underwater diving 5 minutes after they watched the fire video.

Primary outcomes

  1. Memory accuracy

    Time frame: Immediately after participants received the intervention.

    The ratio of correct images participants chose from two images of the fire video they watched.

Secondary outcomes

  1. Positive And Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)

    Time frame: Immediately after participants watched the fire video and immediately after they watched the VR video (intervention) or read the text (comparison).

    PANAS consists of 10 positive affects and 10 negative affects each with a 5-point Likert scale.

Sponsors and collaborators

Lead sponsor

Texas Tech University

Other

Registry information

Official study title

Effects of a Semantically Irrelevant Virtual Reality Experience on Memory and Emotion After Watching a Traumatic Event: Randomized Controlled Experimental Study

Acronym: FIRM

Important dates

Study start
2023
Primary completion
2023
Study completion
2023
First posted
Feb 6, 2026
Registry last updated
Feb 6, 2026

OpenTrials presents study information sourced from ClinicalTrials.gov. The official registry record should be consulted for the latest information.

View the official ClinicalTrials.gov record (opens in a new tab)

This listing is for discovery and informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, does not guarantee that a study is recruiting, and does not determine eligibility. Contact the study team and a qualified healthcare professional when considering participation.

Related clinical trials

Published trials that share one or more normalized conditions with this study.