Mind Mansion: Exploring Metaphorical Interactions to Engage with Negative Thoughts in Virtual Reality
Julian Rasch, Michelle Johanna Zender, Sophia Sakel, Nadine Wagener
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of helping individuals engage with recurring negative thoughts by leveraging virtual reality and metaphor. It introduces Mind Mansion, a VR experience where users declutter and reorganize a virtual apartment using spatial and object metaphors to externalize and cope with thoughts. Through a mixed-method exploratory study with 30 participants, the work demonstrates that metaphorical interactions can enhance engagement, promote coping, and raise emotional awareness, while offering concrete design recommendations for future VR self-care tools. The findings suggest VR metaphoric interactions hold promise as accessible, at-home supports for affect regulation, though clinical validation and careful handling of user variability are needed for broader adoption.
Abstract
Recurrent negative thoughts can significantly disrupt daily life and contribute to negative emotional states. Facing, confronting, and noticing such thoughts without support can be challenging. To provide a playful setting and leverage the technical maturation of Virtual Reality (VR), our VR experience, Mind Mansion, places the user in an initially cluttered virtual apartment. Here we utilize established concepts from traditional therapy and metaphors identified in prior works to let users engage metaphorically with representations of thoughts, gradually sorting the space, fostering awareness of thoughts, and supporting mental self-care. The results of our user study (n = 30) reveal that Mind Mansion encourages the exploration of alternative perspectives, fosters acceptance, and potentially offers new coping mechanisms. Our findings suggest that this VR intervention can reduce negative affect and improve overall emotional awareness.