Investigating the effects of a novel gamified cognitive training on adolescent mental health

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.