According to the World Health Organization, approximately one in three women experiences domestic violence at some point in her life. While some jurisdictions mandate intervention programs for those convicted of such offenses, there is limited evidence to show that these treatments effectively prevent reoffending.
Researchers at IDIBAPS (Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer) and the University of Barcelona have created a virtual reality program designed to help men convicted of domestic violence experience a situation from the victim’s perspective. As published in Scientific Reports, their findings suggest that such offenders often struggle with recognizing emotions and that VR can help enhance this emotional awareness.
Participants in the study were immersed in a virtual environment where their own bodies were replaced by the life-sized body of a virtual female character. This full body ownership illusion was reinforced by synchronizing the movements of the virtual body with the participants’ actual movements in real time. In this virtual scenario, a male aggressor approached the participant, gradually invading their personal space and using threatening verbal and non-verbal behavior such as yelling “shut up!” or demanding “look at me!” when the participant looked away. This immersive setup allowed the offenders to experience the situation from the victim’s first-person perspective.
The study included both male domestic violence offenders and a non-violent control group. Before and after the VR session, all participants completed tests measuring their ability to recognize emotions, particularly fear, in female facial expressions. The researchers found that, initially, the offenders had a significantly lower capacity to recognize fear and often misclassified fearful faces as happy. However, after the VR experience, their performance improved: they became better at identifying fear in female faces and were less likely to confuse it with happiness.
These findings suggest that immersive VR, by inducing empathy through perspective-taking, may help modify cognitive and emotional processes associated with violent behavior. For the first time, this research demonstrates that altering the viewpoint of domestic violence offenders through virtual embodiment can lead to measurable improvements in emotion recognition.
To better understand how the virtual reality experience was implemented in practice, you can watch a short video demonstration of the study here.
