​Department of Human Sciences for Education “Riccardo Massa”

Reading fiction is beneficial for various social skills, although reading has become less and less popular with younger generations. This study investigated whether reading a chapter of a fictional story in virtual reality (VR) can make the reading experience more appealing and increase intention to read the story further. A between-subject experiment (N = 83) was conducted to compare the effect of a printed book and a VR reading environment on narrative absorption, empathy with fictional characters, and intention to read. The results show that VR enhances intention to read, via a serial mediation of transportation into the story world and affective empathy. These findings indicate that VR can be effectively exploited for promoting reading.

La récente départementalisation de Mayotte a contribué à modifier sensiblement la façon d’« être Mahorais » sur l’île et ailleurs. Si les mécanismes traditionnels d’assimilation – exigés par l’évolution institutionnelle – sont déjà bien visibles dans l’île aux Parfums, les aspects liés à l’imprégnation de modes de vie issus de la modernité semblent parallèlement prendre plus d’ampleur en situation de mobilité. L’observation des formes d’organisation sociale et des trajectoires biographiques des Mahorais, durablement installés à La Réunion depuis les années 1980, livre d'une part des éléments de réflexion sur l’évolution des dynamiques d’intégration à la société réunionnaise, et plus largement à la France, en tant que « Français à part entière » et offre d'autre part un point d'étude privilégié sur l’impact des processus d’assimilation post-départementale, ainsi que sur les stratégies de résistance à cette acculturation forcée. À l’heure actuelle, les Mahorais à La Réunion souffrent, bien plus qu’ailleurs, d’une stigmatisation due à leurs spécificités culturelles éconnues par la plupart des Réunionnais. Bien qu’effective, cette marginalisation est vécue de façon différente selon les générations, ainsi que le sentiment d’appartenance à l’une et à l’autre société : si les « anciens » ont gardé un attachement indéniable à l’île d’origine, les plus jeunes « Mahoréunionnais », jeunes d’origine mahoraise nés à La Réunion, démontrent une marginalité identitaire aux deux systèmes culturels. La multiplication des repères identitaires en situation de mobilité a contribué à la création d’une fracture générationnelle entre les jeunes générations et les « Pionniers » de la mobilité mahoraise, qui peut contribuer à une graduelle et définitive intégration de la composante mahoraise dans la société réunionnaise.,Mayotte’s departmentalization process has contributed to profoundly modifying the way to « be Mahoran » on the island and elsewhere. The impact of traditional assimilation mechanisms –required by the institutional alignment program recently launched– is evident at structural level in Mayotte, but at cultural and social level the impact is less obvious. On the contrary, strong signals of Westernization can be observed among the lifestyles of Mahoran families permanently resident in La Réunion, showing the influence of postcolonial acculturation programs and the household response to it. Mobility experiences seems to multiplicated identity markers among Mahoran young people in La Réunion contributing to the creation of a generational fracture with the elders, the « Pioneers » of mahoran mobility, deeply rooted in the traditions. Despite its long-established residence in La Réunion, Mahoran community face stigmatisation and integration problems because of their particular cultural and linguistic specificities, unknown or misunderstood by most Reunionese people. It appears, nevertheless, that this marginalisation is not similarly experienced by the younger « Mahoreunioneses » –Mahorans born in La Réunion– and by the elders « Pioneers » : the young « Mahoreunioneses » express a partial belonging to the two cultural systems which may lead to a resolution of decades of stigma, contributing to a progressive social and economic integration of Mahorans in Reunionese society.,Carnets de Recherche de l'océan Indien, 05, 37-57,

The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character’s behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text.

Supplemental material, add_file_Studies_about_the_effect_of_different_displays_on_the_video_game_experience for Gaming in Virtual Reality: What Changes in Terms of Usability, Emotional Response and Sense of Presence Compared to Non-Immersive Video Games? by Federica Pallavicini, Alessandro Pepe and Maria Eleonora Minissi in Simulation & Gaming

Background.Virtual reality can provide innovative gaming experiences for present and future game players. However, scientific knowledge is still limited about differences between player’s experience in video games played in immersive modalities and games played in non-immersive modalities (i.e., on a desktop display).Materials and method. Smash Hit was played by 24 young adults in immersive (virtual reality) and non-immersive (desktop) condition. Self-report questionnaires (VAS-A, VAS-HP, VAS-SP, SUS, SUS-II) and psycho-physiological measures (heart rate and skin conductance) were used to assess usability, emotional response and the reported sense of presence.Results. No statistical differences emerged between the immersive and the non-immersive condition regarding usability and performance scores. The general linear model for repeated measures conducted on VAS-A, VAS-HP, VAS-SP scores for the virtual reality condition supported the idea that playing in the immersive display modality was associated with higher self-reported happiness and surprise; analysis on SUS-II revealed that the perceived sense of presence was higher in the virtual reality conditionDiscussion and conclusion. The proposed study provides evidence that (a) playing a video game in virtual reality was not more difficult than playing through a desktop display; (b) players showed a more intense emotional response, as assessed by self-report questionnaires and with psycho-physiological indexes (heart rate and skin conductance), after playing in virtual reality versus after playing through the desktop display; (c) the perceived sense of presence was found to be greater in virtual reality as opposed to the non-immersive condition.

Abstract of paper 0767 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019.

This paper focuses on Wattpad, a social reading platform on which people can add comments in the margins of books. Analysing these comments enables the comparison between specific parts of the text and the effects they have on readers. We outline a new research programme, discussing both theoretical and practical issues in the study of Wattpad: from the identification of a methodology holding together reader response theory, cognitive literary studies, and computational text analysis, to the definition of a digital mixed method for the recognition of the linguistic and textual cues that trigger certain effects. We describe a dataset built by scraping the Wattpad website: preliminary statistics on the most commented books in the categories “Classics” and “Teen Fiction” are presented and discussed. To provide an example of the possible uses of the dataset, we introduce a simplified experiment with the sentiment analysis software Syuzhet. By comparing the “emotional arcs” produced in parallel by text and comments, we evaluate the approach and show the substantial differences between the intrinsic emotional valence of the text and the effects it produces.