title: Associations between children's video game playing and psychosocial health: Information from both parent and child reports. [corrected].
abstract: Healthy emotion regulation is crucial for navigating stressful situations. Interoceptive awareness-the awareness of one's internal states-is important for such healthy regulation. Given the propensity for video games to induce stress, the associations between in-game and real world emotion regulation strategies during duress are worth exploring. We therefore present a method for measuring the interoceptive awareness of negative affect during stressful video game play, and investigate whether individual differences in this ability relate to emotion regulation strategies. Twenty-six proficient video game players were recruited to play a session of the video game Starcraft II in the lab. Players' physiological and subjective states of in-game negative arousal were measured consecutively. A comparison of these measures was used to calculate players' interoceptive awareness of real time in-game arousal. The relation between interoceptive awareness and a suite of emotion regulation strategies was then investigated. We observed a positive relation between in-game interoceptive awareness and the self-reported tendency to actively seek a resolution to negative affect. A positive trend was also observed between interoceptive awareness and the self-reported tendency to seek instrumental social support. Findings are discussed in terms of the relative effectiveness of different emotion regulation strategies for aiding in-game success. We further discuss the benefits and limitations of this pilot testing. In all, we hope to inspire future research into the associations between in-game arousal and emotion regulation strategies used in everyday life.
authors.affiliation: Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University , Nijmegen, The Netherlands .
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lobel
authors.forename: Isabela
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Granic
authors.forename: Rutger C M E
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Engels
mesh_terms: D001143:Arousal; D001364:Awareness; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008603:Mental Health; D010988:Play and Playthings; D011998:Recreation; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000209:etiology*; D018910:Video Games / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult