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Video Game With Biofeedback Teaches Children to Curb Anger

Side Note: I find the application of these studies very important especially when it comes to early education. I feel like the future to how we control and use our emotions to benefit rather than be our dismay lies in studies like these that aim to train our brains to regulate and control emotions like any system would monitor itself for peak efficiency. If we can use the applicability and entertainment in video games to make children who have severe anger problems a thing of the past we could be tackling a major problem within early childhood, education and or both. A child with controlled emotions is more likely to focus naturally on the tasks at hand without the need of drugs that may or may not just worsen his or her situation and put them early on into drug reliance.

Children with serious anger problems can be helped by a video game that helps them learn how to regulate their emotions, according to a new study.

Image: Young Spock inside a Vulcan virtual reality educational system Credit: Star Trek (2009)

Noticing that children with anger control problems are often uninterested in psychotherapy, but eager to play video games, Jason Kahn, Ph.D., and Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, M.D., at Boston Children’s Hospital developed “RAGE Control,” a video game with a biofeedback component that helps children practice emotional control skills.

The game involves shooting at enemy spaceships while avoiding shooting at friendly ones. As children play, a monitor on one finger tracks their heart rate and displays it on the computer screen. When the heart rate goes above a certain level, players lose their ability to shoot at the enemy spaceships. To improve their game, they must learn to keep calm, the researchers explain.

“The connections between the brain’s executive control centers and emotional centers are weak in people with severe anger problems,” said Gonzalez-Heydrich, chief of Psychopharmacology at Boston Children’s and senior investigator on the study. “However, to succeed at RAGE Control, players have to learn to use these centers at the same time to score points.”

The study, led by first author Peter Ducharme, M.S.W., a clinical social worker at Boston Children’s, compared two groups of 9- to 17-year-old children admitted to the hospital’s Psychiatry Inpatient Service who had high levels of anger. To qualify for the study, the children had to have a normal IQ and not need a medication change during the five-day study period.

One group, with 19 children, received standard treatments for anger, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, presentation of relaxation techniques and social skills training for five consecutive business days. The second group, with 18 children, got these same treatments, but spent the last 15 minutes of their psychotherapy session playing RAGE Control.

After five sessions, the gamers were significantly better at keeping their heart rate down, the researchers report. They also showed clinically significant decreases in anger scores on the State Trait Anger Expression Inventory-Child and Adolescent (STAXI-CA). Specific decreases were seen in the intensity of anger at a particular time, the frequency of angry feelings over time, and the expression of anger towards others or objects. The gamers also had a decrease in suppressed, internalized anger, according to the researchers.

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(via proletarianinstinct)