The impact of Virtual Reality on the awareness of teenagers to social and emotional experiences of immigrant classmates

The current study examined the use of VR (Virtual Reality) and its affect on the degree of awareness of 178 seventh and eighth graders to the emotional and social experiences of a new immigrant during his or her first months in the adoptive country. Students native to the adoptive country were divided into two groups: an experimental group, which tried out VR worlds designed to simulate the emotional and social feelings and experiences of a new immigrant teen, and a control group which viewed a movie on the same subject. In addition, we have examined another group of teen immigrants who provided us with a benchmark of the degree of awareness to be measured. Their responses were compared to those of native teenagers of the adoptive country. All the subjects responded to an awareness questionnaire before and after the experiment (Sever 1977), and had a personal interview before and after the experiment as well. The results indicate that the experience of a VR simulated emotional and social experiences of a recent immigrant teen has intensified the emotional and social awareness of the experiment group while the movie intensified the social feelings only in the control group.