Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Increasing Adolescent’s Prosocial Attitudes And Behaviors Through Virtual Reality. (#608)

Fei Hu 1 , I-Ching Lee 2
  1. Psychology, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
  2. Psychology, National Taiwan Univeristy, Taipei, Taiwan

    Reducing antisocial behaviors and increasing adolescent’s prosocial behaviors are rather important issues in society. Previous studies have shown that playing video games is associated with increased prosocial behaviors in real world. We conduct a fellow-up study (Mage = 14) to test the causality whether virtual reality manipulation can initiate relatively enduring increases in adolescent’s prosocial attitudes and behaviors across 3 weeks. Using a two-group pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest design (N = 47). Participants were randomly assigned to two virtual reality conditions, either taking a person who fall on the ground through a maze to hospital (helping condition), or running through a maze and reaching hospital alone (control condition). As predicted, participants in helping condition reported significantly more prosocial attitudes and behaviors, more positive self-attributes and less negative self-attributes than participants in control condition over study period. These results suggested that virtual reality could be an effective practice towards adolescent’s prosocial attitudes and behaviors increase. The potentials of using virtual reality as a tool in cultivating adolescent’s prosocial and moral development are discussed.