## 5 Discussion
### VR Impact on Emotional Skills  
The outcomes related to emotional understanding and empathy were modest, offering only partial support for Hypothesis 2 (H2), which proposed that children would exhibit identifiable emotional responses during the VR experience, and were somewhat incongruent with studies that found broader emotional gains with VR tools [16; 17; 18; 21; 22; 23; 24; 26; 36]. Our results showed only slight improvements in emotional recognition for half of the participants and essentially no change in their empathic responses. In contrast, several previous studies have documented broader gains in emotional skills after children with ASD engaged in VR or similar interactive training [12; 14; 26]. The discrepancy betweenthose findings and the present study's limited impact likely stems from differences in intervention length and content depth. Our VR application was used over a very short term, and while it included key emotional scenarios (such as recognizing a friend's sadness or happiness and choosing how to react), the children may not have had enough repetition to master these concepts. Despite this, the pattern we observed--where one student out of four showed a moderate improvement in emotion-related skills--is not unusual. It mirrors the mixed outcomes noted in certain VR studies that reported only some participants benefiting emotionally.  
Similarly, when evaluating how students responded to others' emotions, only [PERSON] showed improvement. This again matches limited but positive results from [PERSON] et al. (2016), [PERSON] et al. (2016), [PERSON] (2022), [PERSON] et al. (2016), and [PERSON] (2019). The mixed outcomes suggest that while VR can help some children improve emotional skills, others may not benefit without additional scaffolding.  
There are several possible reasons why emotional learning did not generalize widely in our case. One consideration is the fidelity of emotional cues in the VR game. While the visual novel format did present characters with basic facial expressions and scenarios involving feelings, these cues might not have been sufficiently explicit or varied for all learners. Children with ASD often require exaggerated or clearly labeled emotional signals to reliably identify feelings. It has been suggested that virtual interventions for ASD should incorporate enhanced emotional content--such as more pronounced facial expressions, body language, and contextual hints--to effectively teach emotion recognition and appropriate responses. In line with this, an improvement for future iterations of our VR tool would be to refine the emotional storytelling: for example, including a wider range of emotion scenarios (joy, frustration, fear, etc.), using animated characters that visibly show those emotions, and narrating the characters' feelings. Moreover, empathy-based scenarios could be added to encourage perspective-taking--situations where the player must infer how another character feels and choose a caring response. Such additions might deepen emotional engagement and learning, helping more children not only identify emotions but also practice responding to them in a supportive virtual context.  
The findings for RQ2 suggest that a short, single-exposure VR story was insufficient to substantially improve emotional skills for most participants, though it hints at potential benefits given the right conditions. Future research and design improvements should emphasize repeated practice and richer emotional content to harness VR's capabilities for teaching empathy and emotional understanding to ASD learners.