Abstract
To prepare for critical incidents on duty, police officers need to acquire the skills and tactics in realistic environments so that they transfer to high-stress circumstances. To bridge the gap between empirical research and applied practice, the present chapter informs about training concepts within the ecological dynamics framework that effectively promotes performance under stress. Specifically, scenario-based police training is critically discussed by identifying research gaps and challenges in the current practice. Virtual reality (VR) is introduced as a promising tool to overcome these challenges in police training and research. The aim of the present chapter is to inform, update, and improve researchers', police trainers', and curriculum developers' knowledge of VR as a tool to address the need for representative stress training while acknowledging its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
TopIntroduction
On duty, police officers are entrusted with the task to ensure the personal safety of citizens, in some cases necessitating the use of (potentially lethal) force. As a result, the most far-reaching decisions and actions by police officers usually occur in highly stressful, unpredictable, ambiguous, and rapidly unfolding situations. Although the majority of calls for services involve non-threatening duties, in those rare situations of high threat, officers need to perform in complex and unforgiving environments, which require optimal task performance. Performance failure in these situations may have tremendous – potentially lethal – consequences for the officers themselves, colleagues, suspects, or innocent bystanders. Therefore, the essential challenge for police academies is to teach officers skills and tactics in such a way that they transfer even to the high-stress circumstances on police duty.
Critically, there is little evidence that officers are immune to the body's automatic responses to threat and stress (Anderson et al., 2002; Baldwin et al., 2019; Giessing et al., 2020). When individual coping resources are judged as insufficient to meet the environmental demands (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984), stress arises. Stress leads to a variety of consequences for the individual, including emotional responses (e.g., anxiety) and physiological changes (e.g., increased heart rate, cortisol secretion; McEwen and Stellar, 1993). These stress responses influence cognition and behavior by shifting attention from goal-directed control to stimulus-driven control (Eysenck et al.,2007; Hermans et al., 2014) – sometimes resulting in impaired police performance (Arble et al., 2019; Giessing et al., 2019; Hope, 2016; Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans, 2010; Nieuwenhuys et al., 2012, 2017; Renden et al., 2013, 2017; Taverniers and De Boeck, 2014, for an overview see Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans, 2017). However, while performance might be challenging, most officers manage to solve even stressful situations professionally and adequately. Apparently, individuals are able and also highly motivated to counteract the debilitative effects of stress: they are predicted to spend extra mental effort in an attempt to reduce stress responses, enforce goal-directed processing of information, and inhibit stimulus-driven impulses (Eysenck et al., 2007; Nieuwenhuys and Oudejans, 2017). Therefore, police training should provide police officers with the opportunity to experience psychophysiological stress responses and their impact on behavior in order to develop and try out effective coping strategies.
Given the inherent complexity and stress of police work, it has been recently highlighted that police training should develop officers to be independent, creative problem solvers despite elevated stress levels (Blumberg et al., 2019; Staller and Zaiser, 2015). To achieve this, police academies should primarily follow the training principle of “train as you fight”, which aims to replicate the performance context as closely as possible to maximize learning outcomes (e.g., Low et al., 2020). The decisive difference between real police operations and training situations is the extent of threat and stress. Therefore, police training should create representative environments that incorporate situational constraints from real-life contexts with the aim to put trainees under stress (Anderson et al., 2019; Di Nota and Huhta, 2019).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Stress: An unpleasant state that arises when an individual perceives his/her coping resources as insufficient to meet the environmental demands. It results in the activation of the sympathetic adrenomedullary system and the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis.
Scenario-Based Training: An immersive learning environment in which trainees are exposed to realistic and occupationally relevant stressors, which allows the integrated practice of verbal, physical, and cognitive skills under realistic circumstances.
Representativeness: The quality feature of a simulation that indicates how well the essential properties are reflected. Properties should be sampled from the criterion environment, achieving similar occurrence probabilities in the learning and criterion environment.
Situational Constraints: Factors in the environment which limits action possibilities of an individual.
Virtual Reality (VR): A computer-generated simulation of a three-dimensional, immersive environment in which the user can interact with objects and communicate with avatars using electronic equipment, such as head-mounted displays, multiple large screens and motion capture sensors.
Training Under Stress: The practice of domain-specific skills under simulated stress (by introducing affective elements in the learning environment that elicit stress) with the aim to maintain or improve the performance in a stressful performance context.
Ecological Dynamics Framework: A theoretical framework to explain the acquisition and transfer of adaptive human behaviors to a specific performance context. In representative learning environments, the trainee can adapt and attune to the constraints of the performance context.
Coping Strategies: Allow to maintain performance under stress by investing mental effort to master, minimize or tolerate stress responses and their impact on cognition and action.