Schizophrenia is probably the most stigmatised of all mental health conditions and many interventions have attempted to reduce this. This study examined how playing a serious virtual reality game might address stigmatised attitudes about severe mental illness, and schizophrenia in particular. The game chosen, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, contains a first-person experience of voice-hearing and other psychotic symptoms. We hypothesised that gameplay would increase Empathy, reduce Desire for social distance and improve attitudes to schizophrenia using measures adapted from prior work. We also measured participants' beliefs about the voices heard by the protagonist, Senua, using the Beliefs about Voices Questionnaire-revised to compare to published data from both clinical and non-clinical voice hearers. 37 participants completed stigma measures both before and after experiencing 20 minutes of the game. Attitudes about schizophrenia significantly improved following the game, but empathy and desire for social distance did not. Results partially support the role that serious games can play in addressing mental health stigma. Overall, Senua's voices were experienced very similarly to those of clinical voice hearers supporting the clinical veracity of the game depiction of psychosis.

Healthcare professionals, including students, may express stigmatising attitudes towards mental illness. Virtual reality is thought to provide a novel insight into the experiences of individuals with mental health conditions and to reduce stigma. This study aims to systematically review the evidence concerning the use of virtual reality as an educational tool to reduce mental health stigma in healthcare and non-healthcare students. Literature searches were conducted across four electronic databases. Studies were eligible if they targeted healthcare or non-healthcare students, used any form of virtual reality, focused on experiences of mental health conditions, and measured changes in stigma-related outcomes. Fifteen studies, of which eight on healthcare students, were included and synthesised narratively. Both immersive and non-immersive virtual reality technologies were used, and most focused on simulations of mental health symptoms. Different outcomes were measured, including stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, and all studies relied on self-report instruments. There is support for using virtual reality to reduce mental health stigma among healthcare students, but not among non-healthcare students. While non-immersive technologies might be as effective as immersive ones, a focus on psychopathology and a lack of educational information appear to increase stigma. Stereotypes and discriminatory intentions were the outcomes most susceptible to change.

We examine a generalised randomised response (RR) technique in the context of differential privacy and examine the optimality of such mechanisms. Strict and relaxed differential privacy are considered for binary outputs. By examining the error of a statistical estimator, we present closed solutions for the optimal mechanism(s) in both cases. The optimal mechanism is also given for the specific case of the original RR technique as introduced by Warner in 1965.

Roger Garside, Geoffrey Leech, Anthony McEnery (eds). Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora. Longman. 1997. ISBN 0-582-29837-7 (Paperback). £26.00. 281 pages - Volume 5 Issue 3