Training Mentalizing Skills In Virtual Reality: An Experimental Treatment For Children

Mentalization is the ability to understand behaviors as underlying mental states such as thoughts, emotions, and motivations. Mentalization development is considered complete between 8 to 12 years old. The possibility to work on this competence may have a substantial role in preventing or intervening in child psychopathology. Mentalizing Skills (MS) are activated in a relational context. This contribution's main objective is to suggest developing a Virtual Reality (VR) tool to assess socio-emotional abilities in children and train mentalization skills (MS) in an immersive environment. More specifically, we aim to test longitudinal variations (before and after intervention) of (1) socio-emotional problems and (2) emotion regulation strategies (expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal). Participants will be assessed with the Roberts-2 test using a VR app to assess MS using a head-tracked Head Mounted Display (HMD). The new app will assess the participants' ability to make inferential thoughts about others' states of mind, and a validated device will record Heart Rate Variability as a measure of emotion regulation. This new protocol will provide a reliable and engaging way to assess and train MS in an ecological environment via an agile technology-based approach, offering clinicians valuable insights into the children's skills/deficiencies, useful for prevention and clinical intervention.