178 Chapter 3 METHODS Participants Forty-three children (20 boys, 23 girls) with elevated levels of anxiety participated in the current study. Participants’ age ranged from 8.17 to 12.65 years (M = 9.94, SD = 1.14) at pre-test. All children attended primary school in the east of the Netherlands and 97.7% were born in the Netherlands. Procedure The current study was part of a 2-armed indicated prevention RCT (Schoneveld et al., 2018) which has been approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Within this RCT, the effect of MindLight on anxiety symptoms is compared to the effect of the CBT-program Coping Cat (Kendall & Hedtke, 2006; Van Starrenburg et al., 2017). Participants for this RCT were selected based on their score on the child-version of the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS-C; Spence, 1998). Children were included with a total SCAS-score one standard deviation above the mean or when they scored one standard deviation above the mean on two subscales of the SCAS (not including the obsessive compulsive disorder subscale). Children that already received mental health care were excluded. Seven hundred and ninety-one children from eight primary schools filled out the screening. Two hundred and eight children met the inclusion criteria, of which 174 children agreed to participate in the study. Eighty-six children were randomly allocated to play MindLight. Seventy-seven children completed the MindLight-intervention. Participants played MindLight (Version 1.0.1; 2014) for a total of approximately six hours. Gameplay was broken down into six one-hour sessions spread out over a six-week period. MindLight sessions took place under supervision of two research assistants at the children’s own school after school hours. MindLight was played on 15.6-inch ASUS X552CL-SX033H laptops, using a MindWave headset (Version 1.1.23, Neurosky Inc., 2011; Johnstone et al., 2012) and a Xbox 360 controller. Children and their parents filled out several questionnaires including the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (Spence, 1998) two weeks before and after playing MindLight, at three-month and six-month follow-up (when children had not played the game for three respectively six months). Before coding the in-game data for the current study, only children that had completed both pre- and post-measurements of anxiety symptoms were included. In addition, only children with (almost) complete video data were selected: children with less than 4 recorded and/or attended play-sessions,
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw