Bullying of Child Clinical Trial
Official title:
Effect of Bullying Content Presented in Immersive 360º-video on Pupil's Cognitive and Psychophysiological Responses
The lack of empathy towards victims of bullying is thought to play a main role in this
extended and pernicious peer victimization behaviour. Thus, promoting empathy in school
programs might be a promising approach for bullying prevention. Virtual reality (VR) allows
creating an environment very similar to the real world and has proved to promote empathy.
Therefore, by employing VR, pupils may better understand and feel the experience of being
bullied. As there is no evidence of the efficiency of VR in bullying prevention, the first
step is to validate the content of the environments created.
In this line, the current study aims to investigate if 360º-videos produce a truthful
experience of being bullied superior than the observed in traditional computer screens. The
effect of all, 360º-videos and 2D computer screens will be assessed through objective
(electrodermal activity -EDA- and heart rate -HR-) and subjective (self-administered tests)
measures.
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.
Hypothesis 2 (H2): Immersive presentation (i.e. 360º-video contents watched in a VR headset)
will elicit higher arousal and higher perceived realism of the scene than the same contents
presented in a less immersive display (a computer screen).
In order to test these hypotheses, the investigators will collect measures of
psychophysiological measures of arousal (electrodermal activity -EDA- and heart rate -HR-)
and emotional regulation (heart rate variability -HRV-), self-reported emotional arousal and
valence, as well as three self-reported measures of the realism of the experience of being
bullied, including: (1) participant's perception on to which degree the represented situation
can be considered bullying, (2) participant's feelings of actually being in the represented
scene ("presence"), and (3) participant's feeling of actually being bullied while watching
the content.
The investigators expect that, compared to watching videos representing other high-school
daily situations not involving (physical or verbal) violence, watching videos representing
situations of bullying, participants' EDA, HR, HRV, and self-reported arousal will be higher
(H1a, H1b, H1c, and H1d, respectively), self-reported valence will be more negative (H1e),
scores of feelings of being bullying and actually being in the scene will be higher (H1f and
H1g, respectively), and the perception of the scene as bullying will also be enhanced (H1h).
It is also expected that, compared to the videos presented in a screen, while watching the
videos in a VR headset participants' EDA, HR, HRV, and self-reported arousal will be higher
(H2a, H2b, H2c, and H2d, respectively), self-reported valence will be more negative (H2e),
scores of feelings of being bullying and actually being in the scene will be higher (H2f and
H2g, respectively), and the perception of the scene as bullying will also be enhanced (H2h).
In addition, it will be explored whether the experienced arousal and perception of realism is
associated with personality traits, such as being uncaring, unemotional, and callousness. The
investigators believe that pupils with higher scores on the mentioned traits will experience
less arousal (subjective and psychophysiological) when watching the videos with bullying
content.
Experimental design: The study adopts a within-subject design in which each participant will
watch four videos, containing the four possible combinations of two independent variables:
Level of immersion (VR headset / computer screen) and Type of content (Bullying / no-bullying
content).
The materials to be used in the experiment will be eight videos representing different scenes
from the perspective of a girl (to be watched by female participants) and four videos
representing different scenes from the perspective of a boy (to be watched by male
participants). Among each group of eight videos, there are four pairs. The two videos of each
pair involve the same location, point-of-view, and actors, but in one of them there is a
bullying situation and in the other there is a daily situation not involving any form of
violence (e.g. children chatting about the last weekend).
Each participant will watch four scenes, two containing bullying scenes and the other
containing daily non-violent scenes. Also, two of them will be presented in a VR headset
while the rest be presented in a computer screen. The level of immersion and type of content
in which each scene is presented will vary among participants following a Latin-square
design, in a way such for the whole sample of participants, all the scenes will be presented
across the two levels of immersion and the two types of content. The order of the
presentation of the four conditions will be randomised for each participant.
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