Previously submitted to: JMIR Serious Games (no longer under consideration since Aug 19, 2022)
Date Submitted: Nov 24, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Positive attention bias trained during the Rethink therapeutic online game is linked to improvements in children and adolescents’ externalizing symptoms and peer relationships
ABSTRACT
Background:
Attentional bias towards positive stimuli is considered a resilience factor for mental health and well-being.
Objective:
Attentional bias towards positive stimuli is considered a resilience factor for mental health and well-being. The aim of the present study was to analyze the effects of an attentional bias training for positive faces in a preventive therapeutic game for children and adolescents.
Methods:
Participants played the REThink game, which included an attentional bias training level based on the visual search paradigm, where children had the task to quickly find the happy face among other angry faces.
Results:
Attentional bias indicators demonstrated acceptable reliability and results showed that increases in attentional bias towards positive faces were associated with improvements in children and adolescents’ conduct problems, hyperactivity, and peer relationship problems.
Conclusions:
Overall, our results support the protective role of training attentional bias towards positive faces as part of a preventive therapeutic game for children and adolescents.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.