Abstract. Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However while other types of education activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problems of supporting educational role-play with technology have only begun to be tackled recently. Within the eCIRCUS project we have designed a framework for technology-enhanced role-play with the aim of educating adolescents about intercultural empathy. This work was influenced by related fields such as intelligent virtual agents, interactive narrative and pervasive games. In this paper we will describe the different components of our role-play technology by means of a prototype implementation of this technology, the ORIENT showcase. Furthermore we will present some preliminary results of our first evaluation trials of ORIENT. 1

This paper investigates how graphically displayed intelligent virtual actors, mobile devices and innovative interaction modalities can support and enhance educational role-play as well as deepen the sense of engagement and presence in participants to produce more successful learning. The discussion will be presented using a showcase from the eCIRCUS project, ORIENT, an application combining virtual and real life role-play for social and emotional learning.

Self-perception theory posits that people sometimes infer their own attributes by observing their freely chosen actions. We hypothesized that in addition, people sometimes infer their own attributes by observing the freely chosen actions of others with whom they feel a sense of merged identity—almost as if they had observed themselves performing the acts. Before observing an actor’s behavior, participants were led to feel a sense of merged identity with the actor through perspective-taking instructions (Study 1) or through feedback indicating that their brainwave patterns overlapped substantially with those of the actor (Studies 2-4). As predicted, observers incorporated attributes relevant to an actor’s behavior into their own self-concepts, but only when they were led to feel a sense of merged identity with the actor and only when the actor’s behavior seemed freely chosen. These changes in relevant self-perceptions led observers to change their own behaviors accordingly. Implications of these vicarious self-perception processes for conformity, perspective-taking, and the long-term development of the self-concept are discussed.

Abstract. Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However while other types of education activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problems of supporting educational role-play with technology have only begun to be tackled recently. Within the eCIRCUS project we have designed a framework for technology-enhanced role-play with the aim of educating adolescents about intercultural empathy. This work was influenced by related fields such as intelligent virtual agents, interactive narrative and pervasive games. In this paper we will describe the different components of our role-play technology by means of a prototype implementation of this technology, the ORIENT showcase. Furthermore we will present some preliminary results of our first evaluation trials of ORIENT. 1

This paper investigates how graphically displayed intelligent virtual actors, mobile devices and innovative interaction modalities can support and enhance educational role-play as well as deepen the sense of engagement and presence in participants to produce more successful learning. The discussion will be presented using a showcase from the eCIRCUS project, ORIENT, an application combining virtual and real life role-play for social and emotional learning.

Decades of research have examined factors involved in complex, and sometimes stressful, interpersonal interactions between individuals with and without disabilities. The present study applies structural equation modeling to test an integrative model of individual and situational factors affecting encounters between able-bodied college students and their peers with mobility impairments. A vignette design was employed that involved input from focus groups of college students with mobility impairments. Data was collected from 360 able-bodied students at a Mid-Western university. Results provided support for a structural model that included previous contact with disability, global disability attitudes, and negative affect in predicting behavioral intentions to avoid. Affective arousal emerged as a strong predictor of behavioral intentions to avoid peers with disabilities. Global disability attitudes were fairly strongly predictive of negative affect and weakly predictive of behavioral avoidance. Secondary analyses explored whether emotion regulation strategies would moderate the effect of negative affect on behavioral intentions to avoid future encounters with a peer in a wheelchair. Reappraisal and suppression emerged as weak but statistically significant predictors of behavioral avoidance. Further, results indicated modest support for the hypothesis that reappraisal can lower the likelihood that an ablebodied