320 Chapter 7 one participant indicated that they did not choose the mental health trailer because “[it] was advertised with [sic] being good for your mental health and stress. I did not fell [sic] stressed or bad at the moment…”). In addition, a game aimed at stress management may imply confrontations with stress for some individuals, but others might think that a mental health game is less stressful than a regular entertainment game. These opposing motivations may have cancelled each other out, explaining why we did not find an effect. Future research should examine how current negative affect and expectations about mental health games (e.g., stress-inducing/confrontations with stress versus stress-reducing) affect the willingness to play a game promoted as a mental health game. Finally, it might be that emotion and stress mindsets are not directly linked to actions of help-seeking because of a moderating or mediating third variable, such as self-efficacy or stigma (see also De Castella et al., 2013; Gutentag et al., 2017). For example, some participants indicated that they did not choose the mental health trailer because “it looks frustrated [sic] and more complicated” and “. . . it implicates that there is something wrong with you”. Future research may examine whether additional variables have an influence on participants’ choice. Change in Mindsets after Playing a Mental Health Game Results showed that regardless of participants’ game choice, emotion mindset did not change. Interestingly, however, stress mindset changed towards a more neutral mindset about the nature of stress (although scores were still on the debilitating side of the scale) for participants choosing the mental health trailer, but stayed the same for participants choosing the entertainment trailer. It remains unclear why participants’ stress mindset changed after selecting and playing the game when it was promoted as a mental health game and not when it was promoted as an entertainment game. Because all participants played the same game for an equal amount of time, the findings strongly suggest that expectations primed through the trailers prior to gameplay were driving these effects. It might be that these prior expectations made participants more aware about the potential benefits of the video game and/or primed participants to focus on any slight stress and interpret that as manageable and less debilitating (cf. Colloca & Miller, 2011; Kirsch, 1997). Future research should examine how expectations of playing a mental health or entertainment game influences participants’ in-game experiences and interpretations. The magnitude of the observed changes in participants’ stress mindset is similar to changes that Crum and colleagues (2013) reported in their first
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