ArticleComputers in human behavior2022
The role of social virtual world in increasing psychological resilience during the on-going COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Computers in human behavior, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Health tourism model in the digital age: emotional healing effects of disembodied landscape perception through social media.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Systematic Review of Extended Reality Digital Therapy for Enhancing Mental Health Among South Korean Adolescents and Young Adults.Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2023Article
- Quantified multidimensional public sentiment characteristics on social media for public opinion management: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Transforming health through the metaverse.Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2022Article
- Chatbot as an emergency exist: Mediated empathy for resilience via human-AI interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic.Information processing & management · 2022Article
- Animal Crossing and COVID-19: A Qualitative Study Examining How Video Games Satisfy Basic Psychological Needs During the Pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Future of mental health in the metaverse.General psychiatry · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has not only impacted the physical health of individuals but the fear and anxiety of contracting the disease has also contributed to psychological distress among people. The current research identifies a novel coping strategy to strengthen individuals' psychological resilience against the pandemic. Study 1 (N = 210) and Study 2 (N = 93) showed significant beneficial effect of representing oneself via avatar in social virtual world (SVW) on the psychological resilience towards contracting COVID-19. Study 2 also showed that this effect is explained by the disembodied (i.e., out-of-body) experience one encounters in the SVW by digitally representing oneself via an avatar), which enables SVW users to project themselves onto a character in a parallel world that is immune to the COVID-19 virus, thus alleviating the anxiety of contracting the virus themselves in the real world. Additionally, it ruled out alternate explanations like escapism and enjoyment. The findings extend the Proteus effect (i.e., individuals behaviorally conform with their avatar's visual/physical appearance) to a more innate feature of the avatar-its imperviousness from the human body's limitations. The results have important implications for health policy makers along with making a strong case for marketing computer-simulated games like SVWs as virtual therapy tools.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.