Using Virtual Reality to Detect, Assess, and Treat Frustration

Frustration is an inherent component of the day-to-day of human activity. Any blockage to reach a goal causes frustration. One of the problems we are currently facing is that tolerance to frustration in children and young people is increasingly lower, and non-adapted behavior caused by low tolerance to frustration is seen more often in the workplace. The first step to avoid this problem is an appropriate detection of the capacity to adapt constructively to frustration. Among the most used tools is the Rosenzweig frustration test; although it is one of the most used tests at the moment when evaluating frustration, it shows a technological gap: it is presented as drawings on paper, in the style of a comic strip. Adolescents and young people of the last generations are used to much more dynamic representations of reality, therefore they see the test as outdated and do not react well to it. This project attempts to tackle these problems by adapting the Rosenzweig frustration test to the current technological needs, reinterpreting it into Virtual Reality scenes, a technological trend that has been successfully used today in many related fields. Besides the work with the Rosenzweig’s test, the project used the Frustration Discomfort Scale as a tool to compare frustration levels and to control and validate the results.