VR for Cognitive and Emotional Well-Being

Dear Colleagues,

The synergy between Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally reshaping the landscape of behavioral health, enabling the creation of adaptive, responsive environments that personalize cognitive training and emotional support in real time. This Special Issue invites high-quality papers on VR technologies that promote cognitive and emotional well-being, aligned with the technological scope of Technologies (MDPI). We welcome contributions that advance VR as a robust platform for assessment, intervention, and monitoring, emphasizing VR hardware and software architectures, interaction and embodiment techniques, multimodal sensing and analytics, AI-driven adaptation and personalization, and robust technical validation, together with or enabling clinically meaningful outcomes and real-world impact. Both original research articles and comprehensive review papers are welcome. We particularly encourage submissions that clearly describe the underlying VR technology (system design, implementation, interaction mechanisms, sensing workflows, analytics methods) and provide rigorous evaluation, including validated behavioral, cognitive, affective, and/or clinical outcome measures, as appropriate for translation into practice.

Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• VR-based digital therapeutics and clinical-grade interventions (technology design, implementation, deployment workflows, clinician-facing tools, integration with clinical practice);
• Clinical outcomes and efficacy studies enabled by VR (symptom reduction, functional improvement, quality of life, adherence/engagement, dose–response, durability of effects);
• VR for mental health and emotion-focused care;
• VR for neurorehabilitation and cognitive disorders;
• VR-assisted pain management and behavioral medicine;
• VR assessment and clinically relevant digital biomarkers;
• Personalized and adaptive VR intervention workflows (AI-driven tailoring, real-time state estimation, risk-aware adaptation, clinician-in-the-loop systems);
• Safety, usability, and accessibility for clinical populations;
• Interoperability and translation to practice (telehealth/EHR integration, remote supervision, multi-user therapy sessions, edge/cloud architectures for clinical deployment);
• Ethics, privacy, and regulatory considerations for VR health technologies (data governance, consent, secure workflows, validation standards, responsible innovation).

We especially encourage submissions that combine technological novelty with rigorous and reproducible evaluation, supporting comparability across studies and fostering translation into scalable, safe, and effective VR solutions for cognitive and emotional well-being.

Dr. Elio Salvadori
Dr. Susanna Pardini
Dr. Nicola Moccaldi
Guest Editors

Dr. Giovanni D'Errico
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Technologies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• virtual reality
• immersive virtual environments
• XR systems
• VR system architecture
• human–computer interaction
• embodiment
• presence
• multimodal sensing
• eye tracking
• motion capture
• physiological sensing
• sensor fusion
• affective computing
• machine learning
• adaptive personalization