Video games as a complementary therapy tool in mental disorders: PlayMancer, a European multicentre study.

BACKGROUND: Previous review studies have suggested that computer games can serve as an alternative or additional form of treatment in several areas (schizophrenia, asthma or motor rehabilitation). Although several naturalistic studies have been conducted showing the usefulness of serious video games in the treatment of some abnormal behaviours, there is a lack of serious games specially designed for treating mental disorders. AIM: The purpose of our project was to develop and evaluate a serious video game designed to remediate attitudinal, behavioural and emotional processes of patients with impulse-related disorders. METHOD AND RESULTS: The video game was created and developed within the European research project PlayMancer. It aims to prove potential capacity to change underlying attitudinal, behavioural and emotional processes of patients with impulse-related disorders. New interaction modes were provided by newly developed components, such as emotion recognition from speech, face and physiological reactions, while specific impulsive reactions were elicited. The video game uses biofeedback for helping patients to learn relaxation skills, acquire better self-control strategies and develop new emotional regulation strategies. In this article, we present a description of the video game used, rationale, user requirements, usability and preliminary data, in several mental disorders.

The Use of Videogames as Complementary Therapeutic Tool for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Bulimia Nervosa Patients.

Although cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been demonstrated to be the most effective approach for the treatment of bulimia nervosa (BN), there is lack of studies showing whether a combination with a serious video game (SVG) might be useful to enhance patients' emotional regulation capacities and general outcome. The aims of this study were (a) to analyze whether outpatient CBT + SVG, when compared with outpatient CBT - SVG, shows better short-term outcome; (b) to examine whether the CBT + SVG group is more effective in reducing emotional expression and levels of anxiety than CBT - SVG. Thirty-eight patients diagnosed as having BN according to DSM-5 criteria were consecutively assigned to two outpatient group therapy conditions (that lasted for 16 weekly sessions): 20 CBT + SVG versus 18 CBT - SVG. Patients were assessed before and after treatment using not only a food and binging/purging diary and clinical questionnaires in the field of eating disorders but also additional indexes for measuring anger expression and anxiety. Regarding the post-treatment psychometric measures, most of the mean differences (Eating Disorder Inventory-2, Symptom Checklist-Revised, State-Trait Anxiety Index, and partially State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory) achieved moderate to high effect size (d > 0.5), in the sense that CBT + SVG obtained the best results compared with the CBT - SVG group. Regarding therapy outcome (dropout, partial remission, and total remission), CBT + SVG showed better results and a moderate effect size emerged for the comparison of the risk of dropout during the treatment, being higher for CBT - SVG compared with CBT + SVG (44.1 percent versus 20.0 percent, d = 0.54). Although the sample size in our study was low, and consequently results should be considered with caution, we have obtained promising findings suggesting that in the short-term CBT + SVG might be a good option not only for improving emotional dysregulation and approaching the current limitations of CBT - SVG in BN but also for enhancing the therapy adherence of patients.