Positive Attention Bias Trained during the Rethink Therapeutic Online Game and Related Improvements in Children and Adolescents' Mental Health.

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. The sample of 54, which consisted of children and adolescents aged between 10-16 years, 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. We measured mental health, and positive and negative emotions and analyzed their associations between changes in attention bias. 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. 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.

Do Improvements in Therapeutic Game-Based Skills Transfer to Real Life Improvements in Children's Emotion-Regulation Abilities and Mental Health? A Pilot Study That Offers Preliminary Validity of the REThink In-game Performance Scoring.

Therapeutic or serious games are considered innovative ways of delivering psychological interventions especially suited for children and adolescents, which can have a positive impact on mental health, while also being fun and easily accessible online. While most serious games for children and adolescents address specific issues, such as anxiety or depression, preventive measures received less attention. REThink is an online therapeutic game designed as a stand-alone prevention tool, aiming to increase resilience in healthy children and adolescents in a Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy framework (David et al., 2019). The aim of this pilot study was to investigate the validity of in-game performance measurements or scores as indicators of the game effectiveness in building real life emotion-regulation abilities. We analyzed how scores of different game levels (addressing different skills) are associated with improvements in mental health and emotion regulation abilities. Our preliminary results suggest that in-game performance at some levels (scores) consistently reflect improvements in psychological functioning, while in-game performance at other levels are less associated with changes in real life self-reported psychological functioning. These results offer important information about which levels can be used as preliminary indicators of psychological improvements, and which levels need to be revised in terms of task or scoring. Overall, results of our study offer preliminary validation of REThink's game scoring system, while also suggesting the elements to be refined.

Beyond contingency awareness: the role of influence awareness in resisting conditioned attitudes.

Evaluative conditioning procedures change people's evaluations of stimuli that are paired with pleasant or unpleasant items. To test whether influence awareness allows people to resist such persuasive attempts, we conducted three experiments. In the first two experiments featuring low levels of influence awareness (N1 = 96, N2 = 93) we manipulated the degree of control people have in expressing their attitudes, by providing participants in one condition with the option to "pass" rather than respond, when they felt influenced in their evaluations of conditioned stimuli. In the third experiment (N3 = 240) we manipulated the level of influence awareness by using a warning instruction similar to the one found in prior controllability studies, while giving everyone the option to pass the evaluation when they felt influenced. All studies found that participants often failed to use the skip option to exert control over conditioned preferences. In some cases, this may be because participants failed to notice the pairings, but in most cases because participants lacked awareness that the pairings could influence them. Even when explicitly warned that the pairings could influence them, participants seemed to believe that they were not vulnerable to such effects.

Personality, relationship conflict, and teamwork-related mental models.

This study seeks to explore whether neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness moderate the influence of relationship conflict experienced in groups on changes in group members' evaluative cognitions related to teamwork quality (teamwork-related mental models). Data from 216 students, nested in 48 groups were analyzed using a multilevel modeling approach. Our results show that the experience of relationship conflict leads to a negative shift from the pre-task to the post-task teamwork-related mental models. Moreover, the results indicate that conscientiousness buffered the negative association between relationship conflict and the change in teamwork-related mental models. Our results did not support the hypothesized moderating effect of agreeableness and show that the detrimental effect of relationship conflict on the shift in teamwork-related mental models is accentuated for group members scoring low rather than high on neuroticism. These findings open new research venues for exploring the association between personality, coping styles and change in teamwork-related mental models.