Here are highlights of presentations by USC researchers at the largest general science conference of the year, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held Feb. 15-19 in San Francisco:

Skip Rizzo, research scientist in the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and clinical psychologist, talked about the potential of virtual reality for mental health therapy.

At a news conference on Feb. 18, Rizzo discussed the application of virtual reality to psychiatric care, including his Virtual Iraq system for helping to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Virtual Iraq uses a head-mounted display and a simulation of a war environment to practice exposure therapy, a proven strategy for treating anxieties and phobias.

The therapy, in use since the end of 2006, has helped a handful of veterans so far to reduce their PTSD symptoms.

“We see immediate post-treatment gains,” Rizzo told reporters. “This translates into being able to leave your house.”

Rizzo cautioned against drawing premature conclusions about the still-new therapy, but he said, “We’re encouraged by what we’re finding.”

He also stressed that VR-based treatments should not be attempted by patients, in real life or in a virtual world, without guidance from a professional.

“We’re staying very close to empirically supported treatments and not trying to replace the clinician, but rather to extend their skills,” he said.

“We don’t want a Wild West show when it comes to delivering good health care.”

In addition to the news conference, Rizzo presented later the same day at the “Virtual Worlds Seminar Part II: Research and Therapy in Virtual Worlds.”

The Power of Imagination

What do people learn from online games? Both more and less than one might think, Douglas Thomas of the USC Annenberg School for Communication said at the gathering – but mostly more.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft do not educate players by any traditional measure, Thomas said.

But, he added, such games do foster a rich and different kind of learning based on imagination and the transfer of meaning between physical and virtual worlds.

In practice, Thomas said, players learn how to behave in the real world through virtual play, and how to behave virtually through real world experiences.

Not that the two can be clearly separated.

Thomas gave the example of a Silicon Valley executive who was also leader of a powerful warrior guild in World of Warcraft.

Eventually, Thomas said, the executive realized that “everything he knew about management, he learned from being a guildmaster.”

Virtual management techniques do not always transfer cleanly to the business world, Thomas said, but the underlying social psychology does.

In another example, Thomas discussed the case of a group of teenage players who used language that other players considered socially offensive.

The ensuing debate taught the teenagers a more powerful lesson than any classroom sensitivity lecture.

“Players are members of a community, and they learn what it means to be members of a community,” Thomas said. “A very strong and powerful sense of community develops.”

In effect, MMOGs continue the childhood experience of pretend play, giving teenagers and adults (the average age of a World of Warcraft player is 28) a valuable and forgiving venue for social learning.

What players learn in one world, Thomas concluded, transfers easily to the other through a player’s imagination.

Thomas presented Feb. 18 at the “Virtual Worlds Seminar Part II: Research and Therapy in Virtual Worlds.”

Virtual Diplomacy

Joshua Fouts, director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, began his presentation on public diplomacy in virtual worlds by recalling his own epiphany three years ago.

Fouts had just joined Star Wars Galaxies, a popular online role-playing game, and was surprised to find that most of the characters he met did not speak English.

“It was a wake-up call to me that these spaces are not spaces that were solely the domain of the U.S.,” he said.

From there came the realization that virtual worlds might be ideal vehicles for public diplomacy, defined as the open communication between a government and citizens of other countries.

The overwhelming reaction of foreigners to American players online, Fouts added, is that Americans are not “half as bad as I thought.”

Fouts went on to establish a home for the Center for Public Diplomacy in the popular online world “Second Life” and to launch a contest to create online games that promote cross-cultural understanding.

The center’s home in “Second Life” has become a laboratory for experiments in virtual public diplomacy by the State Department, foreign ministries of state and leading think tanks.

Ultimately, Fouts said, the site could become “a virtual Embassy Row.”

Fouts presented Feb. 18 in the “Virtual Seminar Part I: Education, Learning and Public Diplomacy in Virtual Worlds.”

Social Climbing

Also presenting at the same seminar was danah boyd (her name is legally lower case), graduate fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, who stressed the soft boundary between the physical and virtual worlds in teenagers’ lives.

Teens use virtual environments as an extension of and a complement to their everyday social networks, boyd said, and as a way to make up for the dramatic drop in opportunities to hang out publicly.

“Teenagers don’t have access to public life,” she said, citing tight controls at home, at school and in commercial malls that prevent teens from gathering spontaneously as often as they used to.

Instead, teens are using MySpace to hang out and learn the rules of social behavior.

“And this is where the virtual is not so virtual,” she said. “You’re just as accountable online as you are offline.”

The new social network sites, which also include systems built on instant messaging and other mobile technologies, are defined by long-term persistence and searchability of communication, replicability of information, such as videos, and invisible audiences.

It will be the younger generation that teaches the rest of society how to deal with the pitfalls and potential of such models, boyd said.

“It’s going to be sticky and gross for a while until we figure it out.”

Pushing for More Action

In a panel focusing on human rather than scientific barriers to sustainability, Daniel Mazmanian of the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development, listed five ways in which the very design of a democratic government inhibits forceful action to develop a sustainable economy.

“I come at this with a suspicion that most people concerned with the environment are not pleased, in fact are rather frustrated with government action,” Mazmanian told a sympathetic audience.

He gave the following reasons for governmental inaction:

• Governments with jurisdictions based on geography are not well-suited to address problems that cross borders. “The acid deposition in the High Sierra now comes to us from China,” he noted.

• Governments tend to focus more on problems than on solutions, often failing to encourage better behavior from individuals and companies. “We’re trying to regulate the bad, which is not necessarily wrong, but it doesn’t get us to a sustainable society.”

• The American constitutional system of checks and balances tends to inhibit major change, except in the wake of disastrous events that jar politicians into action.

• Government at all levels has a natural aversion to change.

• Economic development takes priority over environmental protection, particularly in rapidly growing countries.

Mazmanian, who holds the Bedrosian Chair in Governance at USC, also listed strategies that have evolved to nudge governments into action, ranging from international accords on climate change to results-based environmental governance and the use of moral suasion and self-restraint in international diplomacy.

He made his presentation Feb. 17 at a symposium titled “Social Science Insights for Sustainability.”