Effect of Bullying Content Presented in Immersive 360º-video on Pupil's Cognitive and Psychophysiological Responses

Introduction and Rationale: Previous research suggests that working on the development of cognitive-emotional skills, and particularly on empathy toward victims of bullying, may be a central component for the success of school bullying prevention programs. On the other hand, virtual reality (VR) technology allows adopting the perspective of the world of others, and thus has been claimed to be a powerful tool for eliciting empathy in different domains (cf. Slater & Sánchez-Vives, 2016). Therefore, VR might play a role in bullying prevention programs, by helping pupils to understand how it feels to be bullied, as a way to increase empathy towards victims of bullying. However, currently empirical evidence of the effectiveness of VR in this context is lacking. A key step in the validation of this use of VR is to understand how the immersive presentation of bullying scenes shot from a first-person perspective is experienced by children, compared to the same scenes presented in less immersive displays. In particular, in order to demonstrate the potential of VR technology in this regard, it is necessary to examine the advantages that VR technology (and, more specifically in this case, immersive presentation of 360º-video) presents over more common devices (a computer screen).

Study goals and Hypotheses: The overall goal of this study is to examine whether 360º-videos representing situations of bullying from a first-person perspective produce a realistic experience of being bullied, and that the presentation of such contents in an immersive mode (using a VR headset) elicit a more realistic and arousing experience than the same contents in a less immersive format (a traditional computer screen).

This is the first step in a wider research project; in subsequent steps, the investigators will assess the effects of these type of videos on empathy towards victims of bullying and, eventually, on prevalence of bullying behaviour.

The central hypotheses to be tested will be:

Hypothesis 1 (H1): Contents representing situations of bullying from a first person perspective will elicit on participants realistic feelings of being bullied, compared to contents representing other high-school daily situations not involving (physical or verbal) violence.