Insights into the Predictors of Empathy in Virtual Reality Environments
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The topic presented by the authors is quite interesting. I suggest to the author to better frame the usability of their study and to give some details on how much a different context could affect their findings, as the impossibility of generalising the results impacts the scientific soundness and the significance of the study contents.
1) Check for typos; English language must carefully be revised. The manuscript font must be uniform.
2) Introduction: I suggest inserting this part after the VR has been presented
a. “Virtual Reality (VR) has been used as a technology for perspective taking and some VR applications have been used for developing empathy in different contexts (van Loon et al., 2018) and recent research has shown that perspective-taking experiences might have transferable effects on real-life (Young et al., 2022).”
3) Virtual reality and migrations: the authors should clarify what they mean with VR, as it is a general term that involves different types of technologies with different levels of immersion (monitor, HDM, etc.)
4) Hypotheses development, Engagement: a definition of engagement should be placed here, as done for the Immersion and Compassion. I suggest adding some relevant literature concerning the engagement in VR applications and how engagement can be assessed. Some interesting literature I suggest:
a. “Interpreting Emotions with EEG: An Experimental Study with Chromatic Variation in VR”
b. “Evaluating Player Task Engagement and Arousal Using Electroencephalography”
5) Hypotheses development, Attitudes towards migrants: if I’m not wrong, figure 1 depicts the proposed model of predictors of cognitive and emotional empathy, thus it should be placed in the Methodology.
6) Hypotheses testing and results, Evaluation of the formative measurement model: acronyms entries of the tables must be explicated, even when they are intuitive (table 1).
The English language must be revised.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Please see the attachment for a detailed response to your comments.
Kind regards,
The authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors,
I have carefully reviewed your article titled "Insights into the predictors of Empathy in virtual reality environments" and would like to provide you with some suggestions and questions to further improve the manuscript.
1. I noticed that in the methodological section, you mention the use of VR and refer to another paper for more details. However, the reference provided is not clear; it simply states "(authors, 2023)". I suggest that you verify and provide a specific reference for readers to consult if they are interested in the VR aspects of your study. Additionally, since your paper is focused on VR, it would be beneficial to include a clear description of the specific elements and features of the virtual-reality environment used in the experimental design, adding some pictures could help readers to understand better the context of study.
2. You mention that your study differs from previous research that focused on investigating how user experience factors might influence empathy change in VR experiences. It would be helpful to briefly discuss the specific user experience factors explored in previous studies and explain how your study contributes to the field by investigating different predictors of empathy in the VR environment.
3. The use of established scales from previous researchers (Interpersonal Reactivity Index, Immigration Scale, User Engagement Scale, Compassion Scale…) provides a foundation for measuring the constructs in your study. However, self-assessment measures, although widely used, can be susceptible to bias and may not fully capture the actual learning outcomes. I think is important to acknowledge the existence of other types of measurements and including in your literature review some studies that have implemented objective measures or observational data, to complement the self-assessment scales. Please include the following studies that have addressed similar matters in VR, engagement and emotional research fields and discuss your reasons for selecting scales measuring tools (for example: budget constraints, ease of distribution of questionnaires, large study sample, etc):
*Towards an integrated framework to measure user engagement with interactive or physical products. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12008-022-01087-6
*Prosocial Virtual Reality, Empathy, and EEG Measures.https://doi.org/10.3390/app10041196
*Cognitive and emotional engagement while learning with VR: The perspective of multimodal methodology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2022.104495
4. In the discussion section, it would be helpful to offer some potential reasons or theoretical justifications for why compassion has a positive influence on emotional empathy but not on cognitive empathy. Are there any specific differences in how participants engaged with the VR environment during emotional and cognitive empathy tasks that could explain this discrepancy?
5. In your limitations section, you acknowledge that the VR environment used in this study was tailored to create empathy about migrants, and thus, the predictors identified might not generalize to other domains. It would be helpful to discuss the implications of this limitation for the broader applicability of your findings and how future research might explore predictors of empathy in different VR contexts.
I hope my suggestions would help you to further strengthen your research.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Please see the attached file for a detailed response to your comments.
Kind regards,
The Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript has been sufficiently improved.
The quality of English language is sufficient.
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have made the necessary revisions. I believe the paper can be accepted for publication in the current state.
