Resumen de Promoting empathy through virtual reality experience: the case of sexual harassment
Introduction: In the past decades, Virtual Reality (VR) has been exponentially adopted in clinical psychology for treating several psychological disorders and promoting well-being. VR is an advanced form of human-computer interface that allows the user to interact with and be present into a 3-D environment in a naturalistic manner. The use of VR has expanded to simulate not only the external world, but also the body experience, giving the illusion to embody a “virtual” body. When this illusion is successfully induced, the participant can perceive themselves as another person and feel the emotions of the embodied body. This model has been adopted to study empathy such as in sexual violence context to induce a change in men's perspective, and empathy.
Objective: This doctoral thesis aims to achieve three general objectives: (1) to review and meta-analyze the existing literature on VR and empathy; (2) to investigate the effectiveness of a VR system based on a 360° video to induce the illusion of body swap with the (a) same gender, and (b) different gender; (3) to generate a 360° video on sexual harassment recorded from the perspective of a victim woman, and to test whether it induces positive changes in empathy, and decreases the violent attitude variables.
Method: The meta-analysis followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis method; the 360° video was recorded from the first-person perspective and compared with a non-invasive video; a 360° video was recorded from the perspective of a woman who was a victim of harassment, and compared with a narrative (counterbalanced design).
Main results: The meta-analysis included 7 articles with a total of 335 participants, the effect size of empathy was d+ = .44 and of perspective-taking was d+=.51. The embodiment study: (a) 42 participants participated in the study. The analysis showed significant results on the sense of embodiment for the same gender: ownership p = .003; agency, p < .001; location p = .013. (b) 46 male participants participated in the study. The analyses showed significant results for the sense of location p < .001, and property, p < .001, but not for agency p = .222. Study on sexual harassment: 44 male participants participated in the study. The main results were the carry-over effect for the 360° video data, namely the sense of empathy is significant when the 360° condition is presented first (p = .030), also for the perspective-taking variable; p = .012.
Discussion: This doctoral thesis showed that VR could positively change empathy, and in particular the 360° video based-VR can be an effective tool to generate the body's illusion, and consequently changing the sense of empathy towards the other person.
