319 7 MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS IN A MENTAL HEALTH GAME Motivation to Change and Engagement with a Mental Health Game Our findings that the motivation to change stages did not predict game choice nor influenced participants’ engagement with the game promoted as a mental health game compared to the game promoted as an entertainment game, were unexpected. Although we conducted the study among young adults experiencing at least mild mental health symptoms, it seems that on average our participants were currently not considering treatment or looking for help, as indicated by scores around the mid-point for the action and maintenance subscales. The current sample seems to include individuals that are less motivated to change their symptoms compared to individuals already receiving counselling or admitted for treatment (e.g., Greenstein et al., 1999; Lichtenberg & Hummel, 2000). Nevertheless, this low motivation to change did not prevent participants from choosing to play a game promoted as a mental health game. In fact, 59.7% of the participants chose to play the game promoted as a mental health game – regardless of their motivation to change – and they played it for a similar period of time as participants choosing the game promoted as an entertainment game. This finding speaks to the promising potential of using games as mental health interventions, given that over two thirds of youth do not seek professional help for their mood and anxiety disorders (e.g., ESEMeD/ MHEDEA investigators et al., 2004; Merikangas et al., 2011), which appears to be mainly because of the perceived stigma associated with professional help (Clement et al., 2015). The current findings support the notion that video games for mental health are a promising approach to reach individuals with mental health symptoms, even the ones that are not inclined to seek professional help. Emotion and Stress Mindsets and Engagement with a Mental Health Game Contrary to what was expected, our results showed that emotion and stress mindsets did not predict game choice nor did they influence participants’ engagement with the game promoted as a mental health game compared to the game promoted as an entertainment game. We hypothesised that individuals with a fixed emotion/stress-is-debilitating mindset would be less likely to choose a game promoted as a mental health game than individuals with a growth emotion/stress-is-enhancing mindset, and that these individuals would play that game for a shorter period of time. However, there may have been different reasons for why individuals did or did not select the mental health trailer. For example, it might be that right before and/or during the experiment participants were not experiencing negative emotions that needed to be regulated, and therefore did not choose the mental health trailer (e.g.,
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