Virtual Reality & Social Development 

Linked to The Friendship Project - An Intervention for Schools, our research project Virtual Reality & Social Learning aims to better understand the potential of novel technologies in interventions to improve social and moral competencies in children.

We assume that Virtual Reality (VR) offers unique opportunities to promote peer inclusiveness due to its immersive nature that enables a livelier interaction with the story and the possibility to explore complex social interactions from multiple perspectives.

In a first step, the project focuses on whether VR environments can be successfully used to facilitate empathy-related emotions and to understand underlying mechanisms. We will specifically focus on the potentials of VR for different subgroups of children, e.g. those with lower levels of imagination. Further we will use these insights to study how to best include VR components in the existing intervention.

The Virtual Reality & Social Learning project is funded by the Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship Program: jacobsfoundation.org/activity/jacobs-foundation-research-fellowship-program/.