Virtual Stealth Assessment: A New Methodological Approach for Assessing Psychological Needs

In the past decade, the use of technology is extensively increased. Technological systems as virtual reality represent nowadays novel and efficacy tools in several areas, such as in psychology and education. Realism, sense of presence, engagement, experimental control, and ecological validity represent some of the advantages than traditional methods based on paper and pencil tests. Furthermore, psychological research gathering information about a person relative to specific attributes, such as abilities, personality, and cognitive competences is usually conducted using pre-test-post-test designs. Such traditional assessments are not able to catch and examine the dynamic and composite performances and behaviours in run. Virtual stealth assessment could provide a valid and reliable method for evaluating real behaviours in real-time during the virtual experience. In this article, we proposed stealth assessment as a new methodological approach to study the Grawe’s model on the basic psychological needs by using virtual immersive environments, providing the theoretical development of the model on one psychological need with the relative virtual game.