## 1 Introduction  
The present work aims to test the emotional dimensions of intergroup helping interactions using a virtual environment. According to classical socio-psychological literature, both the decisions to give and seek help are associated with emotional arousal. Giving help may be associated with a personal evaluation (\"Am I capable of helping?\" \"Can my help be effective?\"), eventually leading to a final decision regarding whether to help [1]. When seeking help, emotions are aroused by the admission of incapability and implication of dependence on the donor in any explicit request [2]. Moreover, since helping interactions decrease social distance when the helper and helpee are perceived as dissimilar from one another, as in cases in which one belongs to an outgroup, emotional arousal is theoretically expected to increase [3] and the decision to help or request help is expected to become lower. However, empirical pieces of evidence collected according to this theoretical framework while directly observing help-seeking and help-giving behaviors, hypothesized how emotions and self-assessed emotional arousal could be associated with social desirability of respondents. We, therefore, planned to run a pilot experimental study within a virtual reality (VR) environment in which participants' emotional reactions could be both directly monitored and self-assessed. Social distance during helping interactions was manipulated by exposing participants to virtual scenarios in which they were faced with both seeking and giving help to a confederate helper/helpee with three different types of dress (business man vs. beggar, with casual dress as a control condition) and different ethnicities (white vs. black), which were either the same or different from the ethnicity of the participants (all of whom were white Italian university students). Aside from the control scenario, when crossed, these two variables led to four different conditions. Two conditions involved maximum similarity between the participants and confederate (played by a white actor), and either high status (the actor was dressed as a businessman) or low status (the actor was dressed as a beggar) was signalled. The other two conditions involved maximum dissimilarity between the participants and confederate (played by a black actor), and either high status (the actor was dressed as a businessman) or low status (the actor was dressed as a beggar) was signalled.  
Within this research, the role played by empathy was taken into account using traditional self-assessed measures. According to the consolidated scientific definition [4], empathy is a complex emotional state composed of a positive empathic experience of being focused on the other (which causes one to feel soft-hearted, compassionate, and moved), as well as a negative experience of personal distress due to others' suffering (which causes one to feel upset and distressed).  
The results revealed that the two self-assessed sides of empathy (personal distress and empathic interest) loosely mirrored the EEG measures of alertness, calmness, and engagement. Thus, these were directly monitored during participants' exposure to helping interactions with confederates. Participants showed higher alertness according to the EEG measure and self-reported more personal distress while exposed to a helping interaction in which the person in need was either a high-status member of another ethnic group or a low-status member of the same ethnic group. On the contrary, participants showed higher levels of calmness and engagement when interacting with a person in need who was either a low-status member of another ethnic group or a high-status member of the same ethnic group. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Sections 2 and 3 present classical works on helping, empathy, and intergroup relations and look at studies that use VR; Section 4 illustrates the performed experiment and discusses the results, and the last section discusses conclusions and future work.