Our Latest Research Results -
Date :
2007-09-22
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.
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.
In the first study we found that a certain, problematic style of processing social information may indeed play a role in determining the amount of cortisol - the stress hormone - in peopleès bodies when they are under stress. The information processing style is often referred to as an "attentional bias", and is measured with a simple reaction time test. In this test the research participant is briefly shown two faces, side by side. One of the faces is then replaced by a probe (e.g., two dots arranged vertically) and the participant is asked to press a computer key as quickly as possible to identify the type of probe. If reaction times are slightly faster when the probe replaces a frowning face on the screen, compared to other trials where it replaces a smiling or neutral face, this indicates that the person's attention tends to be grabbed - within a split second -- by social threats. That is, faster reaction times on these trials indicate that the person's attention was already drawn toward the threatening face at that area of the screen.
We found that people who had a more pronounced attentional bias of this kind tended to have more cortisol in their bodies as they performed extremely difficult, stress-inducing arithmetic puzzles in public. Cortisol is a key hormone in the body's stress response: In small doses it can help you deal with a threat, but if you have high levels in your system chronically, it can contribute to the wear and tear on your body and increase your risk of developing a laundry list of serious medical problems. The correlation we observed in this first study showed that focusing on threatening aspects of social situations may increase your perception of, and reaction to, stress.
In the next two studies we tested whether our videogame, in which the player searches for one smiling face in a grid of scowling faces, might help people modify their attentional biases. I have discussed elsewhere this idea of using videogames in this way, but the reasoning bears repeating: It is well known that practicing scales on a piano can help one develop the skills necessary for playing Mozart, and repeatedly playing a computer game such as Tetris can change the player's automatic mental processes for construing shapes and movements. Following this line of thought, we have been working on specially-designed computer games that might change the way people automatically and unconsciously relate to others and themselves. In each of these two studies, participants first filled out a questionnaire measure of self-esteem and then played the game for five minutes. Half the participants played the find-the-smile game, while the other half were in a control condition where they played a placebo version involving finding a five-petalled flower in a grid of seven-petalled flowers. Shortly after playing, they did a reaction-time measure of attentional bias: either the two-face "dot-probe" measure described earlier, or an Emotional Stroop in which they tried to quickly name the colour in which threatening words were displayed on the screen.
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. |
