Applied Cyberpsychology: Military and Defence Applications

Virtual environments are synthetic computer simulations that represent activities at a high degree of realism. Virtual environments have numerous applications for military and defence purposes, ranging from allowing personnel to experience realistic, high-pressure situations with a sense of presence, but in the absence of real world risk, to modelling threats to national and international infrastructure to improve resilience. Emerging opportunities also exist for communication and intelligence gathering, exploring on-line social cognition and group behaviour, and understanding how to mitigate the negative effects of combat-related stress disorders, for example. In this chapter we introduce psychological theory and contemporary cyberpsychology research, and offer an albeit very brief introduction to the rapidly developing application of technology to better understand human behaviour and facilitate performance for military and defence purposes