From Global News:

Video games already provide entertainment and diversion, but they may soon boost self-esteem and improve mental health.

Based on knowledge that many of our reactions to life’s stresses happen in a split-second and often without our awareness, Mark Baldwin’s team at McGill University in Montreal started wondering whether they could program people’s brains to react differently.

"All we did was say, ‘OK, can we train it?’ And once you ask the question, you kind of think, ‘Why not?’ " the psychology professor says. "You can train anything else. You can train a golf swing, you can train arithmetic skills through practice and drills, so why shouldn’t you be able to train some of these automatic thoughts about social experiences, about self and others, about relationships?"

[…]

They’ve already developed some simple games available at MindHabits.com, Baldwin says, including one in which players find the smiling face amid a sea of frowning faces and another where a smiling face appears each time a player clicks on a word related to them, such as their name or year of birth.

"It’s just like Pavlov’s dog. This boosts self-esteem, makes people feel a little less aggressive in response to insults," Baldwin says. "It’s a long way from being a therapy of any kind; these things are games and little laboratory tasks. But someday I think there’s going to be some use for this as a part of some kind of psychological intervention."

Read the full article on Global News.

Do you use similar games to kind your brain in shape, like Brain Age on the Nintendo DS?

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Tags: health, mcgill, mindhabits