326 Chapter 8 The aim of the current thesis was to examine the potential of applied and casual games for improving mental health in youth, and to investigate the influence of nonspecific (motivational) factors on game selection, game experiences, engagement and mental health outcomes. Part 1 of my dissertation presented a state-of-the-art overview of the field through a systematic review that focused on randomised controlled studies assessing digital games as interventions to improve mental health in youth. The review encompassed an exploration of the effectiveness of both applied and casual games across diverse mental health domains, integrating both clinical and healthy populations. Additionally, current research trends within the field were examined. In Part 2, we investigated several specific and nonspecific factors, their impact on engagement with the game, and their association with mental health outcomes, utilising the applied game MindLight. The research outlined in Part 3 aimed to enhance our understanding of how (nonspecific) motivational factors influence the selection of mental health games, as well as subsequent game experiences and engagement with mental health games. The current concluding chapter of my dissertation presents a summary and general discussion of the main findings, followed by a reflection on the limitations within this dissertation and recommendations for future research. Additionally, implications of the findings for game design and implementation will be discussed. INCREASING ENGAGEMENT AND EFFECTIVENESS THROUGH NONSPECIFIC FACTORS In Chapters 3, 4 and 5, we examined specific and nonspecific predictors of engagement and effectiveness in MindLight, an applied game to alleviate youth anxiety. MindLight incorporates three evidence-based techniques from cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), namely relaxation (Price & Budzynski, 2009), exposure (Feske & Chambless, 1995; Kendall et al., 2005), and attention bias modification (Bar‐Haim, 2010; Bar‐Haim et al., 2011). The game aims to teach youth how to cope with anxiety in a playful manner. Research from our own GEMH lab demonstrated MindLight’s effectiveness in reducing anxiety, with effect sizes comparable to those reported in meta-analyses on CBT (Mychailyszyn et al., 2012). Additionally, our research suggested that nonspecific factors may play a role (Scholten et al., 2016; Schoneveld et al., 2016). Therefore, in the current dissertation, we conducted further research on specific and nonspecific factors in MindLight.
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