Harnessing the Power of Virtual Reality to Study Parent-to-Child Transmission of Height Fears through Social Learning

This project harnesses the power of virtual reality (VR) to unlock how children learn height fears from parents through social learning. By combining VR for the first time with real-time tracking of physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and subjective fear responses in parents and children, this proposal is the first to study how this intricate network of fear responses aligns and passes down intergenerationally when confronted with the virtual danger of falling. This groundbreaking approach offers new insights into socially transmitted fears and intergenerational mechanisms of fear transmission, paving the way for future evidence-based parent-child VR interventions to effectively prevent fear transmission.