Addressing Self-Criticism: The Development of a VR Experience

Abstract

Self-criticism is a pervasive cognitive pattern that undermines mental health and academic functioning in university students. Current VR-based mental health interventions focus predominantly on anxiety disorders through exposure paradigms, relying on fixed, pre-authored content— an approach that places limited emphasis on cognitive restructuring, which must target each individual’s specific maladaptive thought patterns. In this paper we present a VR system that enables participants to engage in cognitive restructuring of self-critical personalized thoughts, developed through interdisciplinary collaboration between computer science and clinical psychology. The system pairs a web-based clinical interface—where psychologists configure patient-specific self-critical phrases and compassionate alternatives—with an immersive Unity application for Meta Quest 2, in which users confront their own thoughts through the embodied metaphor of a broken mirror. We describe the system architecture, interaction design, and design rationale based on principles from Cognitive–Behavioural Therapy and Compassion-Focused Therapy. We discuss design implications and outline directions for a planned empirical evaluation with university students