Contemporary police officers often lack a proper understanding of civilian’s mental states required to deliver an appropriate empathic response. Recently, virtual reality (VR) emerged as a...Show moreContemporary police officers often lack a proper understanding of civilian’s mental states required to deliver an appropriate empathic response. Recently, virtual reality (VR) emerged as a promising medium to promote empathy, offering several crucial advantages over traditional methods. However, as research is limited on VR empathy training, its effectiveness and practical utility for the police remains unclear. This study investigated the effectivity and utility of two VR empathy tools for the Dutch police force. In this study, 11 Dutch police officers were immersed in two simulations of the perspectives of a child victim of domestic violence (DV) and a person living with a mild intellectual disability (MID), in counterbalanced order. Results showed that, in line with the hypotheses, for the DV simulation, participants’ illusionary feeling of presence in the virtual world predicted their emotional involvement with the experience, and in turn, this emotional involvement predicted empathy towards victims of domestic violence. Contrary to the hypotheses, for the MID simulation, presence did not predict emotional involvement. Yet, in line with the hypotheses, emotional involvement did predict empathy towards people living with a mild intellectual disability. Combined with insights from post-simulation interviews, both VR empathy tools are concluded to be effective and useful for Dutch police empathy training. These findings highlight VR’s potential to shape scalable and standardardized training opportunities to support the complex role of contemporary policing. Future research could extend our approach by including a control group and by making a direct comparison between VR, traditional perspective-taking tasks, and roleplay empathy training.Show less
Police officers need hard skills and soft skill during their work. Adequate soft skills are essential for a police officer because they use them during most of their time working, they can prevent...Show morePolice officers need hard skills and soft skill during their work. Adequate soft skills are essential for a police officer because they use them during most of their time working, they can prevent unnecessary use of force and they influence the public perception of police quality. Feedback is less objective for soft skills training and real interactions are too complex to simulate in a classroom. Virtual Reality (VR) soft skills training might be able to create a more realistic training environment. The first part of the study used a survey to research police officers’ feeling of preparedness for different incidents. It was expected that police officers feel more prepared for incidents requiring hard skills compared to incidents requiring soft skills. In the second part of the study, participants tried out two VR empathy simulations and answered questionnaires about their experience. It was expected that the simulations were able to induce empathy towards the protagonist in police officers. It was also expected that self-reported presence predicts how police officers rate the effectivity of the training. Although results show that participants indicated to feel more prepared for incidents requiring hard skills, participants mostly mentioned that soft skills should be better prepared. This contradiction is possibly caused by a relationship between the work experience of the participants and their feeling of preparedness. The VR simulations were unable to induce empathy and no relationship was found between self-reported presence and the effectivity of the training. Future research should investigate the feeling of preparedness of recently graduated police officers. More research is needed into the effectiveness of VR empathy training. Learning more about police officers’ feeling of preparedness and the effectivity of VR contributes to the soft skill adequacy of police officers and possibly other professional fields.Show less
