“Breaking the fourth wall”: The effects of cinematic virtual reality film-viewing on adolescent students’ empathic responses

This research study investigated the use of cinematic virtual reality (CVR) in a seventh-grade social studies classroom and its effects on adolescents' empathic responses. In this quantitative research study, participants (n ​= ​60) completed the Adolescent Measure of Empathy and Sympathy (AMES, Vossen et al., 2015) as a pretest a week before viewing The Displaced, a film about the lives of three refugee children, in either CVR or two-dimensional (2D), 360-degree format. Promptly after viewing the film, participants repeated the AMES as a posttest. Paired t-tests were conducted to explore the changes in mean scores for the AMES subscale scores between participants viewing the film in CVR and 2D formats as well as the changes in mean subscales between male and female participants viewing the film in CVR. Gain scores were also calculated and analyzed through a two-way MANOVA to examine the possible interaction effect between film format and gender on AMES subscale scores. The results of this study indicated that while the 2D, 360-degree film format affected adolescent students' affective empathy, there was a greater increase in both cognitive and affective empathy scores for those viewing the film in CVR with male adolescent students’ scores demonstrating the most remarkable increase.