Despite growing interest in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) for mental well-being, prior work using immersive interventions to teach mental health skills has largely focused on calming or abstract settings. As a result, little is known about how realistic social simulation may better support the transfer and application of skills to in-person environments. In this work, we present a 14-day user study with 43-participants comparing an augmented reality intervention simulating a realistic contextual environment against a matched non-contextual control, applied to the public speaking context. We found that participants who practice mental health skills in the contextual environment showed significantly greater likelihood to apply self-care techniques and greater physiological stress reduction when using skills in mock in-person tasks. Overall, our work provides empirical evidence for the effects of realistic stressor simulation, and offers design implications for mental health technology that supports effective transfer of skills to the real-world.

翻译：尽管虚拟现实与增强现实（VR/AR）在心理健康领域的应用日益受到关注，先前利用沉浸式干预教授心理健康技能的研究大多集中于平静或抽象的场景。因此，关于现实社交模拟如何更好地支持技能向线下环境的迁移与应用，目前所知甚少。本研究通过一项为期14天、涉及43名参与者的用户实验，在公开演讲场景中，对比了模拟现实情境环境的增强现实干预与匹配的非情境对照条件。研究发现，在情境环境中练习心理健康技能的参与者，在模拟线下任务中应用自我关怀技术的可能性显著更高，且使用技能时生理压力降低幅度更大。总体而言，我们的工作为现实压力源模拟的效果提供了实证依据，并为支持技能有效迁移至现实世界的心理健康技术提出了设计启示。