VIRTUAL REALITY AND BODY EXPERIENCE: A NEW APPROACH TO THE TREATMENT OF EATING DISORDERS

International audienceEating Disorders, one of the most common pathologies of the occidental society,have long been associated with alterations in the perceptual/cognitiverepresentations of the body. In fact, a large number of studies have highlightedthe fact that the perception of one's own body and the experiences associatedwith it represent one of the key problems of anorexic, bulimic and obesesubjects. The effects have a strong influence on therapy effects: severe bodyrepresentation disturbance is predictive of treatment failure. However, thetreatment of body experience problems is not well defined. Two methods arecurrently in use: the first is a cognitive/behavioral approach aimed atinfluencing patients' feelings of dissatisfaction; the second is a visual/motorialapproach with the aim of influencing the level of bodily awareness.The Virtual Environment for Body Image Modification (VEBIM), a set of tasksaimed at treating body image, tries to integrate these two therapeuticapproaches within an immersive virtual environment.This choice not only makes it possible to intervene simultaneously on all of theforms of bodily representations, but it also uses the psycho-physiological effectsprovoked on the body by the virtual experience for therapeutic purposes. Thispaper describes the VEBIM theoretical approach and its characteristics. It alsopresents a study on a preliminary sample (60 normal subjects) to test theefficacy of this approach