2 45 REVIEW OF APPLIED & CASUAL GAMES FOR MENTAL HEALTH Clinical Populations ADHD and Attentional Problems Twenty studies (described in 22 papers) included participants with ADHD, ADHD symptoms, and/or (neurodevelopmental conditions characterised by) attentional problems. Participants’ mean age ranged from 7 to 15 years, and the proportion of male participants varied from 52.2% to 100%. All studies employed a regular RCT design, with the exception of one study (reported by Bul et al., 2018; and Bul et al., 2016) which used a crossover design. See Table A.2 (Appendix) for the characteristics and findings of these studies. Most studies examined (in)attention as (primary) outcome variable, hence this was taken as (first) outcome of interest. Effect sizes for attention were calculated on data from 14 papers. Attention measured by means of a task was preferred, with (in)attentional problems reported by a clinician (Qian et al., 2018) or parents (Dovis et al., 2015; Shalev et al., 2007; Van der Oord et al., 2014) was considered when task-based measures were not available. Eight papers were not included in the forest plot, because they did not measure attention (Barkın et al., 2023; Benzing & Schmidt, 2019; Bul et al., 2018; Bul et al., 2016; Prins et al., 2011), were part of a study that was already included (van Houdt et al., 2021), or data could not be obtained (García-Baos et al., 2019; Kollins et al., 2020). Nine papers included two intervention arms, comparing the applied game to an active condition (Bikic et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2020), to (a) casual game(s) (Medina et al., 2021; Weerdmeester et al., 2016), to a passive condition (Qian et al., 2018; Van der Oord et al., 2014), or comparing an active condition to casual game(s) (Bikic et al., 2017; Ji et al., 2023; Shalev et al., 2007). Five papers included three intervention arms. The studies of Rodrigo-Yanguas et al. (2023), Steiner et al. (2011) and Van Houdt et al. (2019) included an applied game, active condition and passive condition and therefore each contributed two effect sizes to the plot. Dovis et al. (2015) investigated a full-active, partially-active and full-placebo condition of the applied game. The difference between the full-active and partially-active condition was that working memory was not trained in the partially-active condition. As working memory is not an outcome of interest in the current review, only an effect size comparing the full-active condition to the full-placebo condition was included in the plot. The study by Tullo et al. (2018) included an active condition, a casual game and a TAU condition. However, as the TAU condition did not focus on attention, only an effect size comparing the active condition to the casual game was included in the plot.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw