For her study at the University Utrecht (Social and Organisational Psychology), Laura Buijs researched the development of cognitive empathy at youngsters in a interactive visual installation for the COMMIT/Play programme. A research report of her internship is now available as pdf. This report is written in Dutch.
Summary of the research
Waag has developed an interactive installation within the COMMIT P4: Virtual Worlds for Wellbeing programme for the project Play. Users create a visual representation on projected screens with the aid of the motion sensor of a Kinect. In this research, the effects of this interactive installation are measured on the empathy level of the users. For this purpose they had to represent six basic emotions.
Expected results were that the level of empathy of users that portray an emotion would rise. Also was expected that emotions would be represented as described in the literature of the upcoming research field of embodied cognition. The research was conducted among 63 youngsters, aged between 14 and 17, coming from secondary schools in Amsterdam.
The results show that the level of cognitive empathy at participants that observed the users in the installation did increase, if compared with the levels before the test. This effect was also applicable to the users of the installation themselves, but did not increase further during the test. The effect was enhanced by the family situation of the youngsters: those from a family with divorced parents had a higher level of cognitive empathy, compared to those of which the parents were living together. This effect was only measurable at observing participants. A follow-up to this research might shift the emphasis to youngsters with problems, the creation of a secure environment for users and the role of observants in the installation.
