Overview of virtual psychological interventions in Latin America and Spain before the COVID pandemic. Documentary Review

Abstract

The article presents a documentary review on the interventions of psychology in virtuality, revealing techniques, practices, and novelties in virtual psychological interventions before the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective was to investigate the current state of virtual interventions in psychology before the pandemic. A review of fifty articles was conducted, researched in specialized sources, such as Redalyc, Scielo, Dialnet, E-libro, EBSCO among others; In addition, content analysis and qualitative analysis methodology by categories were conducted. In the articles investigated, it was found that virtual reality (VR) is the most used tool to perform a virtual psychology interruption before the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the psychological problems intervened, before the pandemic, anxiety, depressive, eating, neuropsychological, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders were identified. It was also found that virtual reality is effective and has high acceptability in psychological treatments, which enables virtual psychotherapeutic processes, as an effective experience, requiring, for its optimal functioning, diversity, and dynamism in virtual communication. It was concluded that VR is the most used technique in the treatment of different psychological problems, before the pandemic, especially in anxiety disorders, so it is the most intervened problem.