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🩺 Ethnoacting in VR for Cognitive Empathy in Nurses

🩺 Ethnoacting in VR for Cognitive Empathy in Nurses

Pilot Study | University of East London | March 2025

❤️ Why Cognitive Empathy? Developing cognitive empathy is vital for nursing students and practitioners to understand patients’ feelings and provide compassionate care. Traditional role-play methods can be challenging or limiting, so this study explores an innovative VR-based alternative grounded in dramatic techniques.

🎭 The Approach Based on the Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) theory from psychology, this intervention:

  1. Uses Ethnoacting to embody patient experiences without needing group performances
  2. Immerses nurses in VR scenarios that foster a deep understanding of patient feelings
  3. Focuses on individual internalisation rather than group role-play dynamics
  4. This method aims to enhance cognitive empathy skills while respecting the practical realities of nursing education.

🧪 The Pilot Tested in March 2025 with nursing students and apprentices actively working in healthcare, the pilot included:

  1. Immersive VR sessions juxtaposing patient perspectives with nurse attitudes
  2. Survey research and statistical analysis to measure effectiveness
  3. Qualitative feedback highlighting positive experiences and a focus on authentic patient understanding
  4. Results show promising evidence for VR as a powerful tool to cultivate empathy in healthcare education.

📚 Forthcoming Publication The full findings will be published in:

Stamatiou, E., Cox, G., Thoma, V., Balla, G. & Sanni, O. (forthcoming 2026). Ethnoacting in VR for Cognitive Empathy in Nurses: An Equivalent to Role-Playing in Healthcare Education. In Tizzard-Kleister & Firth, T. (Eds.), Using Applied Drama in Nursing and Healthcare Education: A Handbook for Educators. Routledge.

Dataset Collections Activity Stream AI Tags

Data and Resources

Cognitive Empathy in Nursing Lecture ALL.pptx
Download

The lecture on Cognitive Empathy used in the study began with participants completing the...

PPTX
Patient testimony isolation.m4a
Download

Real patient testimonies from individuals in isolation were recorded by actor Evi Stamatiou,...

audio/mp4
Hospital Isolation Room VR Environment
Download

A video demonstrating the participant's experience in a VR environment while engaging in...

MP4

Tags

Cognitive Empathy
The ability to understand and mentally represent the emotions and perspectives of others, without necessarily sharing their emotional state.
Compassion Satisfaction
The positive feeling derived from helping others, especially in caregiving or professional roles.
Ethnoacting
No description found
Modelling
The process of creating a representation of a system or phenomenon to understand and predict its behavior.
Nursing
The profession or practice of providing care for the sick and infirm.
Positive Psychology
A branch of psychology that shifts focus from mental illness to the scientific study of conditions that contribute to the optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions.
Virtual Reality
A simulated, digital experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world, which is typically presented to the user through a VR headset or head-mounted display.

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