Psych student explores VR treatment for PTSD

You would never know from her sunny disposition that Sofiya Synychych’s interest in studying psychology is rooted in trauma – her own and her family’s.

Now, as a senior psychology major at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, she is working with faculty members on a virtual reality experience to soothe the anxiety of those with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Synychych was born in Ukraine and lived there until she started high school in Troy, Mich., where her parents had moved to get away from the country’s war with Russia. They chose Michigan because of the area’s large Ukrainian population.

While living in Ukraine, her family was in the military, and tensions with Russia and the war that broke out when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 affected her and her family daily. She went to live with her grandparents in the mountains, farther from the war, before eventually joining her parents in Michigan.

When it came time to choose a college, she wanted to explore a new area of the United States and attend a school with a good psychology program. After looking at the University of Pittsburgh, she saw the Bradford campus, and its mountains reminded her of her grandparents’ home in Ukraine. She also knew it would be easy to spend time doing things she loved – snowboarding, skiing, hiking and camping.

Even though she and her family are now far from the war, they still experience varying degrees of PTSD. “I want to figure out why some people can walk away from shooting incidents, and some can’t. Why some people process things differently,” she said. “That’s what got me really interested in psychology.”

When she moved to Michigan, she began seeing cultural differences between herself and her new classmates.

Growing up in Ukraine, she had learned English in school and speaks fluently. She was not as fluent, she observed, in cultural communication. She said her American classmates often took things personally that Ukrainians wouldn’t.

Once she told an American classmate that she did not like their pants. The classmate was offended, but Synychych could not understand why. To her way of thinking, whether or not she liked the pants had nothing to do with whether or not she liked the person wearing them.

“So, I knew I wanted to understand how people tick,” she said. “I knew I wanted to go into psychology.” 

Her first experiment was on herself. As an avid videogame player, Synychych experimented with exposing herself to the things she feared via videogames. It’s not something she recommends, she said, but that experience piqued her interest when Dr. Greg Page, associate professor of psychology, told psychology capstone students that they would be working with students in Jeremy Callinan’s virtual reality programming and technology class.

In capstone classes, seniors undertake culminating projects that put to use what they’ve learned during their undergraduate studies. The psychology capstone students read literature on immersive VR therapy as a way to expose people safely to their fears or provide guided mindfulness and meditation. 

“The literature supports it,” Page said. The psychology and VR technology students developed a virtual rock-stacking activity in which a person puts on a headset and uses hand-held controllers to virtually balance rocks on top of each other as a form of meditation.

Time ran out in the fall semester before Synychych and her fellow psychology capstone students could evaluate the effectiveness of their creation, but she wanted to keep going with research into the spring semester and had an idea more ambitious that stacking rocks.

This semester, Synychych has met with Page and Callinan weekly as they develop an application to simulate snorkeling. She designed the structure of the app, gave feedback at each step of development, and wrote a script that leads users through meditative activities such as breathing exercises and a “body scan,” a practice to focus on different areas of the body to release tension.

After spring break, she will assess the finished product with fellow psychology students, evaluating student stress levels before and after use. She will present her research at the university’s Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Day in April.

Having experimented a bit with technology in practice, Synychych now hopes to incorporate artificial intelligence into her practice someday.

Page is pleased with the results of her extra semester of effort. “Her vision with this specific piece is so much more polished than it was in our capstone class,” he said.

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