'I Call Upon a Friend': Virtual Reality-Based Supports for Cognitive Reappraisal Identified through Co-designing with Adolescents

Virtual reality (VR) offers great promise to expand delivery models for therapeutic interventions to help adolescents develop adaptive emotion regulation skills. Cognitive reappraisal (CR) is an emotion regulation skill that involves changing your thinking to improve your emotional state. However, adolescents face developmental and implementation barriers to do CR successfully. To better understand adolescents’ (15-18 years) lived experience of CR challenges and how they envision VR could support their skills learning and transfer to everyday life, we ran three co-design workshops (N=69). Our research weaves together the workshop findings with prior literature to identify directions for future VR-based CR interventions. From our study results, we generated design strategies leveraging best practices of existing research: embedded and embodied scaffolds, providing different points of view, and externalizing the inner self. To illustrate these strategies in practice, we show how each would work in a challenging emotional scenario identified by adolescents.