University of Twente Student Theses
Using Virtual Reality to Train Suicide Negotiation: The Role of Presence, Empathy, and Rapport
Bünnemann, Lorenz (2024) Using Virtual Reality to Train Suicide Negotiation: The Role of Presence, Empathy, and Rapport.
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| Abstract: | Suicide negotiation concerns talking to a person in dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations. To best help the person out of the situation, the Behavioural Influence Stairway Model (BISM) was developed by the United States crisis negotiation unit of the FBI. Suicide negotiation training is being administered mostly through role-play. This experiment considers the usage of Virtual Reality (VR) as an alternative training method. Participants were tasked to watch training videos to learn about the BISM and then had to carry out a crisis negotiation with a virtual character considering suicide, where they had to select answers corresponding to the different stages of the BISM and the performance as determined by the adherence to the BISM stages was evaluated. Afterwards, a survey was administered regarding their experienced levels of spatial presence, social presence, empathy towards the agent, and rapport with the agent. It was tested whether spatial presence or social presence were positively associated with crisis negotiation performance and whether there is a positive relationship between empathy or rapport and spatial or social presence. Contrary to expectation, empathy and spatial presence had negative effects on the performance of the participants while higher perceived rapport improved performance. Empathy was significantly positively correlated with social presence and rapport. This study is one of the first exploring Virtual Reality as a tool to teach crisis negotiation with the findings highlighting the negative effects spatial presence and empathy can have on performance in VR crisis negotiations. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 77 psychology |
| Programme: | Psychology MSc (66604) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/102489 |
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