Empathy and Situational Interest During a Virtual Reality Task

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Abstract

This study explored the relationship between empathy and situational interest in a history learning VR task to examine the efficacy of such curricular tasks and offer recommendations for improving VR experiences in history learning. We recruited 49 undergraduate and graduate students to watch an approximately five-minute virtual reality movie, Defying the Nazi, from Life VR. Following, participants completed a survey battery capturing their empathy and situational interest. We performed correlations, multidimensional scaling, latent profile analysis, and visual plots using disaggregated data of illustrative cases from our sample. Overall, we found a strong relationship between empathy and situational interest following the VR historical empathy task. However, all constructs in our study were deemed important in that emergent experience.

Authors

• Joseph Eisman, Purdue University

• Hyangeun Ji, University of North Texas

• Insook Han, Korea University

• Timothy Patterson, Temple University