Investigating the effects of a novel gamified cognitive training on adolescent mental health
Date
2025
Authors
Grunewald, K.
Minihan, S.
Andrews, J.L.
Songco, A.
Blakemore, S.J.
Chau, A.K.C.
Fischer, J.
Fox, E.
Nelissen, A.B.
Raffe, W.
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Journal article
Citation
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, 2025; 19(1):72-1-72-17
Statement of Responsibility
Karina Grunewald, Savannah Minihan, Jack L. Andrews, Annabel Songco, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Anson Kai Chun Chau, Jaimee Fischer, Elaine Fox, Alba Bruggeman Nelissen, William Raffe, Matthew Richards, Aliza Werner-Seidler, Susanne Schweizer
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Abstract
Background Adolescence is a time of increased emotional volatility, with emotion regulation still developing. Training the cognitive substrate of successful emotion regulation has been shown to benefit adolescents’ mental health. However, cognitive training interventions often have low adherence rates in this age group. The current study therefore trialled a novel gamified cognitive training program in adolescents. Methods A longitudinal study was conducted throughout 2023 where 144 culturally diverse adolescents (13–16 years, 48% female) completed 12 days of either a novel gamified affective control training program, the Social Brain Train (SBT), or a standard non-gamified affective control training program (AffeCT). Participants also completed mental health and mechanisms of change questionnaires at baseline, post-training, and 1-month follow-up, as well as behavioural affective control and interpretation bias measures at baseline and post-training. Results The total minutes spent training did not differ significantly across the two training groups. Participants assigned to SBT training, however, did engage in more training sessions than participants assigned to AffeCT training. Additionally, all participants showed improvements in affective control performance and a reduction in interpretation bias and rumination from baseline to post-training. The observed reduction in rumination persisted at 1-month follow-up. Conclusions As engagement is often the most difficult thing to achieve in cognitive training with adolescents, observing greater repeated engagement with the gamified cognitive training is promising, given training on these apps is entirely self-motivated. Observing benefits to affective and cognitive control performance as well as reduced interpretation bias and rumination tendencies after very limited training is promising, as these factors have all been previously linked to improved mental health symptoms among adolescents. The present findings therefore suggest there may be merit in using gamification techniques to improve the design of future training programs, and employing these to improve affective, cognitive, and emotion regulation abilities in adolescents.
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© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.