Exploring social exclusion through immersive virtual reality: a qualitative comparison with the Cyberball paradigm in children and adolescents

While the Cyberball paradigm is effective in eliciting exclusion-related distress in studies, it lacks ecological validity and fails to simulate realistic peer interactions. To overcome these limitations, we developed a 3D immersive Virtual Reality (VR) classroom scenario where participants experienced exclusion in peer conversations. This study introduces and validates this novel VR paradigm aimed at assessing social exclusion in children and adolescents within school contexts. A total of 150 students aged 8–16 engaged with both the VR and Cyberball paradigms in a counterbalanced design. Using reflexive thematic analysis of open-ended responses and a follow-up group discussion, we examined participants’ emotional reactions to each paradigm. Both paradigms successfully elicited feelings of social exclusion, but the nature and intensity of responses varied developmentally: adolescents showed deeper emotional insight and more critical appraisals of social rejection after the VR paradigm, while children reacted more to graphical and playful features. Compared to Cyberball, the VR paradigm evoked stronger perceptions of realism and social presence, enhancing its effectiveness in replicating real-life exclusion experiences. While the VR paradigm was well received, feedback from group discussions revealed that improvements in avatar behaviour, voice synthesis, and dialogue realism are needed to strengthen its ecological validity. Future refinements will further enhance the VR paradigm’s utility in both educational research and applied psychological practice. Nonetheless, this current VR paradigm offers a developmentally sensitive and ecologically valid tool for examining how social exclusion is perceived across different age groups.