302 Chapter 7 a game promoted as a mental health game. By making the mental health benefits of a game explicit, players are presumably more aware of changes in emotions and their stress level, which could have an influence on their mindset concerning the malleability of emotions and/or the nature of stress. Hence, we hypothesised that playing a game promoted as a mental health game would lead to changes in participants’ emotion and stress mindsets as a result of the game experience. In the current study, participants were young adults with elevated levels of mental health symptoms. Participants viewed two trailers, in which the same commercial video game was presented as a mental health game and as an entertainment game. Although participants believed they could choose between two different games, both trailers portrayed the same commercial video game, which allowed us to attribute differences in gameplay duration (as an indication of engagement) to the mental health message, while holding game content equal. The current study was part of a larger study on the impact of different messaging types on the choice and experience of mental health games. A previous publication on this dataset (Poppelaars, Wols, et al., 2018) showed that young adults with elevated mental health symptoms were 3.71 times more likely to select the game introduced as having mental health benefits than the game with the entertainment message. METHOD Participants Participants were 155 young adults (Mage = 21.48, SDage = 3.36) with elevated levels of mental health symptoms. Of these 155 participants, 26 were excluded from the analyses because a) they realized that the two trailers were about the same game and/or b) knew the (broader) aim of the study, leaving 129 participants (95 women) for data analyses. Excluded participants reported to be playing video games for more hours per week (M = 7.83, SD = 10.19) than included participants (M = 4.25, SD = 6.77; t(29.60) = -1.72, p = .096), presumably making it more likely for them to notice that the two trailers were about the same video game. Based on a-priori power analyses (power = 80%, α = 0.05, medium effect size), at least 128 participants were required for the analyses. Participants included in the analyses were between 18 and 31 years old (Mage = 21.33, SDage = 3.20) during screening and 49.6% of the participants were born in the Netherlands, 29.5% in Germany, 13.2% elsewhere in Europe, and 7.8% outside Europe. Most participants (82.2%) were currently enrolled in a
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