GAMES AND ONLINE VIDEO GAMES DESIGNED TO HELP PEOPLE REDUCE AND COPE WITH STRESS INCREASE SELF CONFIDENCE

GAMES AND ONLINE VIDEO GAMES DESIGNED TO HELP PEOPLE REDUCE AND COPE WITH STRESS

VIDEO GAMES that lower stress increase confidence lower anxiety: Game to find smiling faces and get happier? People with lower self esteem focus on negative

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I like this computer game where you are presented with pictures of many people and you have to find the faces that are smiling. It's not as simple as it sounds.








It's quite rapid. It certainly focuses your attention. You can try it for free at the MindHabits web site (see below). Researchers at McGill University say that online and video games where you find a smiley face can help reduce stress and increase confidence.
"The McGill research team has developed the MindHabits Trainer game, in which one exercise shows a grid of faces, with 15 of them frowning and one smiling.The player must find the smiling face as quickly as possible."It's harder than it sounds," said McGill psychology professor Mark Baldwin, who led the team.





Speaking about the computer games for stress. "Our starting point is past research showing that insecurity feelings and daily stress arise, in large part, from anxieties about whether one will be liked, accepted, and respected by one's peers and significant others .Sometimes people are aware of these concerns, but often social insecurities of this type influence people's thoughts and feelings "automatically", without a lot of deliberate thought and sometimes even entirely outside of their awareness. All they experience are negative reactions to the self or to social situations".









The idea is that through repetitive playing, the mind is trained to focus on the positive aspects of life.



In a field test, a sample group of telemarketers was asked to play the game everyday for a week just before their shift. A control group spent five to 10 minutes playing another game, without smiling faces, before their shift started.



At the end of the week, the group that played the "find the smile" exercise reported feeling less stressed, had higher self esteem, made more sales, and were rated as being more confident in their phone calls. Most remarkably, said Balwin, they had 17 percent lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol".



As they write in the blog Mindhabits "I urge you to get a copy of the October 2007 issue of the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. There you’ll find our lab’s latest findings on how specially-designed videogames can help people cope with stress".

Playing social-intelligence game reduces stress hormone by 17 percent


"This five-study project was part of my former graduate student Stéphane Dandeneau’s PhD dissertation at McGill University. The findings have been generating a lot of interest, so I’d like to summarize them here".



"We wanted to see if specific patterns of social information processing might contribute to stress; if these patterns could be changed with the help of specially-designed computer games; and if the development of new habits of thought might lead to lowered stress levels in day-to-day life".



"To make a long story short, whereas people with lower self-esteem tended to show a pronounced attentional bias toward threat, this tendency was essentially removed if they first played the find-the-smile game. This suggests that attentional habits can indeed be trained by practicing the ability to orient toward positive and away from negative social feedback".

Mindhabits Great Games from Serious Science

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