MindLight: A Video Game Intervention to Reduce Children's Anxiety

Anxiety is the most prevalent form of children's mental health problems and demand far exceeds treatment availability. Even when children do have access to care, evidence-based treatments such as cognitive-behavioural therapy have several limitations: they are largely didactic, leaving children unmotivated and disengaged; children get little practice in using the skills they are taught, creating a large gap between their knowledge and their everyday behaviour and therapy is costly, often prohibitive for the children that most need it. Therapeutic video games can address each of these gaps: they are engaging contexts through which children practice skills (rather than memorize lessons), and they cost substantially less than conventional approaches. The proposed research will test the effectiveness of MindLight, an innovative video game that targets childhood anxiety problems. MindLight incorporates several evidence-based strategies including relaxation and exposure techniques, attention bias modification methods, and neurofeedback mechanics that together produce an immersive game world through which children learn to manage and overcome anxiety symptoms. Two randomized controlled studies with 8-16 year old children are proposed to test the effectiveness of MindLight in reducing anxiety: the first is a prevention study aimed at children at risk for developing serious anxiety problems and the second is a clinical trial aimed at decreasing symptoms in anxiety-disordered children. Children randomly assigned to the intervention group will play MindLight for 5 hours over 2-3 weeks; control participants in the prevention sample will play a commercial video game with a similar theme for the same amount of time whereas control participants in the clinical sample will use an online cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) program. Both studies will assess children's anxiety levels before the intervention, just after, and at a 3-month follow-up. Moderators (e.g., comorbidities) and mediators (e.g., attention biases) will be assessed to identify potential mechanisms of change associated with successful intervention effects.