Templeton Grant: Teaching Empathy & Compassion with VR Games
Awarded a $233,918 research grant (2020 - 2025) from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to serve as Principal Investigator for the project: "Teaching Empathy and Compassion through Virtual Reality Games".
This significant grant supports a two-year intervention and research initiative exploring the use of virtual reality games to foster empathy and compassion. The study involves 540 teenagers across five secondary schools in Lagos, Nigeria.
The project investigates the effectiveness of VR game-based interventions designed to cultivate perspective-taking, emotional understanding, and prosocial behaviors within this demographic. It leverages insights from positive psychology, game design, and developmental science.
The funding enables comprehensive data collection, program implementation, and collaboration with local schools and communities. The findings are expected to provide valuable evidence on the effectiveness and scalability of using VR games to cultivate empathy and compassion among adolescents in diverse cultural contexts.