Abstract
Improving soldiers’ resilience and recovery has always been the core of military training for all countries. Current research tends to consider stress negative, which leads to unhealthiness or unhappiness; as a result, some scholars believe that stress should be avoided or reduced as much as possible. Frankly speaking, the existence of stress is inevitable in military environments. For example, turning into a soldier from a civilian in military academy exerts great pressure on freshmen, which is necessary. In practical, the implementation of stress management courses is fragmentary and discontinuous. Such lectures focus more on theories, which could not make students truly comprehend the nature of stress. In this study, stress theory and virtual reality technology design are adopted to overcome the difficulties of current curriculum. For the stress mindset theory, some scholars believe having a stress-is-enhancing mindset will enhance physical and mental health as well as raise the happiness, while having a stress-is-debilitating mindset may cause negative effects on physical and mental health as well as decrease the happiness. Therefore, the theory of curriculum design in this study will adopt the theory of stress-is-enhancing mindset. This viewpoint emphasizes that stress mindset is a belief, and that strengthening an individual’s mentality will enhance their ability to face challenges. Through learning stress-is-enhancing mindset, military academy students can well deal with stress in the future. The course adopts a Mindset Training Program proposed by Crum [2], which includes a three-step, two-hour teaching course. In the first part, “The Paradox of Stress” introduces the possibility to make people weak or strong through the stress. In the second part, “The Power of Mindset”, the stress is specified and defined through films and examples to explain how attitudes influence individual’s psychology and physiology. In the third part, three steps to strengthen mentality are adopted. The steps aim to help new cadets adopt a positive and conscious way to strengthen mentality. The third part will include virtual reality technology, a kind of computer technology that enables participants to interact with computer-generated three-dimensional scenes. Participants can produce the same behavior and emotions as in real situations, and it takes less time. Finally, the results of this study are expected to give educators a new model for stress management, and further enhance the resilience and recovery of the military.
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Chen, ST., Chiu, PL., Mao, CC. (2020). Bringing Virtual Reality into Military Mental Health Education: A Pilot Study on Stress Management Course. In: Ahram, T., Falcão, C. (eds) Advances in Usability, User Experience, Wearable and Assistive Technology. AHFE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1217. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51828-8_93
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