By IANS
Montreal : Researchers at a Canadian University have found that playing a social intelligence video game may help reduce stress.
The video game ‘Matrix’ designed by researchers at McGill University at Montreal helped people shift the way they processed social information.
The new findings have been published in the October edition of the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The researchers also conducted several studies and found that it reduced the stress hormone ‘cortisol’ by 17 percent.
“We already knew that it was possible to design games to allow people to practise new forms of social perception, but we were surprised by the impact this had when we took the games out of the lab and into the context of peoples’ stressful lives,” said McGill psychology professor Mark Baldwin.
In one of their recent studies, the researchers recruited 23 employees of a Montreal-based call centre to play one of their games, which involves clicking on the one smiling face among many frowning faces on a screen as quickly as possible.
Through repetitive playing, the game trains the mind to orient more toward positive aspects of social life, Baldwin said.
The call-centre employees did this for a week. They filled out daily stress and self-esteem questionnaires and had their cortisol levels tested through saliva analysis on the final day of the experiment.
These tests showed an average 17 percent reduction in cortisol production compared to a control group that played a similar game but without the smiling faces, reported Newswise wire.
“There are many possible applications for this kind of game from helping people cope with the social anxiety of public speaking or meeting new people, to helping athletes concentrate more on their game rather than worrying about performing poorly,” Baldwin said.