Development of Alcohol craving induction and measurement system using virtual reality: Craving characteristics to social situation

Alcoholism is a disease that affects some part of brain that control emotion, decisions, and behavior. Sometimes, people experience situation that have to drink alcohol in their social life. Alcoholic needs cognitive behavior therapy to develop restraint on alcohol craving. Alcohol craving could be triggered when exposure to object, environment, or social pressure situation which is related with alcohol. But cognitive behavior therapy have defect in which does not provide social pressure situation properly. Virtual reality (VR) is human-computer interface that computer expressed an immersive and interactive three-dimensional virtual environments like real space in world. In this study, we developed alcohol craving induction system using virtual reality to provide social situations in which avatar asks to drink together. Nine males and one female (age from 21 to 27 years) who do not have any history of alcohol related disease were recruited for this experiment. In the results, in situation without social pressure, more alcohol craving was induced in situation with alcohol than that of a situation without alcohol. That means our alcohol craving induction system shows same result as conventional study shows. In situation with social pressure situation, induced alcohol craving were not difference between in situation with alcohol and in situation without alcohol. In situations with alcohol and without alcohol, there were significant difference between situation with avatar (social pressure) and without avatar (situation with alcohol p=0.01, situation without alcohol p=0.001). In cognitive behavior therapy, social pressure situation is needed to alcohol craving, because people get more alcohol craving in social pressure situation which is stressful and negative. It could help to more effective drinking refusal training. Particularly, alcohol craving induction system developed in this study using VR is able to use in alcohol refusal training for alcoholism therapy.