# A Test Platform for Managing School Stress Using a Virtual Reality Group Chatbot Counseling System
## 2 Literature Review
### Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Group Counseling  
Psychological counseling is a purposeful dialogue and communication between psychologists and subjects which helps subjects to understanding the symptoms causing discomfort with their current mental state. Psychologists assist subjects to perceive how their past experience affects them, understand their emotions and habits, and assist subjects to take better care of themselves and become more aware of their moods and behaviors and learn how to better control symptoms. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a commonly used method in psychotherapy. It is a communication therapy based on understanding the effects of our thoughts, concepts, and attitudes on our emotions and behaviors. Since people tend to automatically rely on the same set of thought patterns to resolve problems, continuous negative thoughts and behavioral patterns can create a pessimistic or hopeless perspective and cause potentially damaging psychological symptoms [4]. Using CBT, the therapist will lead the patient to recognize their own views towards different situations and indicate how the situations influence their mood, behavior, lifestyle choices and instruct patients how to solve problems by correcting their thinking and behavioral reactions. Patients are asked to recall and confront feared or avoided objects or situations as the reference point of the therapy. The therapy session will start with fear activation to reciprocal inhibition. The final goal is to decrease distress and process extinction learning, stimulus discrimination, and occasion setting [5]. The focus in cognitive therapy is to achieve short- and long-term goals. In the short term, the goal is to alleviate symptoms and make patients return to normal life. In the long term, the goal is to prevent the patient from returning to the symptoms. The session will include mood checks, homework review, agenda setting, discussion of problems, homework development, and session wrap-up [6]. CBT is particularly useful for reducing anxiety arousal [7]. Group counseling can effectively use time, space, manpower and other resources to treat large numbers of patients, with economic benefits [8]. Therefore, group counseling is widely used in clinical practice. Recent literature discusses the effectiveness of group consultation. Group counseling with 64 graduate students in Indonesia was conducted to divide the students into an experimental group (n = 32) and a control group (n = 32). The experimental results showed that group counseling can effectively reduce students' anxiety and stress [9]. Another study on group counseling for high school students with high stress found that group counseling significantly reduced their measured levels of stress [10]. One study demonstrated ways to change students' learning insight thought processes during COVID-19 through group counseling. Many students were forced to change their learning mode (e.g., in-class teaching) due to COVID-19 and opposed new distance learning methods which affected their academic performance. The study recruited fifteen junior high school students who had negative views about the learning system during the COVID-19 pandemic to participate in group counseling [11]. After providing group guidance over several meetings, ten students (about 67%) changed their minds and agreed with the new learning system, while the remaining five students maintained their original negative views. Because of the foregoing advantages of group counseling, we decided to focus on this counseling method as the technology adopted for this research. Some studies apply CBT to group counseling. Common counseling methods taught to academics and future professionals in psychotherapy often include methods to reduce psychological stress and anxiety by improving personal self-efficacy. Self-efficacy refers to the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations.