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Listening to your own advice, as if from a third person, a form of metacognitive mentalizing, has demonstrated utility for emotional regulation and problem solving (as in “What would Jesus do?”). Investigators in Spain compared two virtual reality (VR) paradigms for coping with “mid-level” distressing problems in 58 university-based healthy volunteers (mean age, 22; women, 52%), who underwent body scans to create self-avatars and who identified their concerns (primarily social and work-related anxiety and family problems).
The paradigms involved separate preparation and intervention sessions. In the scripted paradigm (“S”), participants' self-avatars held discussions with an avatar resembling Sigmund Freud, a “virtual counselor” who asked qu…