50 Chapter 2 (2021). Finally, the four effect sizes comparing an applied game to a passive condition ranged from –0.01 to 0.62, all being nonsignificant. Three studies (described in one paper) focused on self-injury among participants with a recent history of (non-)suicidal self-injury (Franklin et al., 2016). Participants’ mean age ranged from 22 to 24 years and the proportion of male participants in the studies ranged from 19.3% to 41.1%. All studies used a regular RCT design and were conducted online. As this was the only paper focussing on self-injury, no effect sizes were calculated and no forest plot was made. See Table A.6 in the Appendix. Psychosis Four studies (described in five papers) involved participants within five years of psychosis onset, at high risk for a psychosis, or had psychosis. Participants’ mean age ranged from 15 to 21 years, and the proportion of male participants varied from 50.6% to 74.4%. All studies used a regular RCT design. See Table A.7 (Appendix) for the characteristics and findings of these studies. All studies were interested in assessing the effects on cognition, utilising various subtests to measure cognitive functioning. Because Loewy et al. (2016) designated verbal memory as primary outcome, this concept was also taken from the other papers to compute effect sizes, facilitating cross-study comparisons. Effect sizes were calculated on data from four papers. As the paper from Urben et al. (2012) originated from the same study as Holzer et al. (2014) and only reports on the outcomes at follow-up, this paper was not included in the forest plot. The four papers included in the forest plot all include two intervention arms, comparing an applied game (Fisher et al., 2015; Loewy et al., 2016; Piskulic et al., 2015) or an active condition (Holzer et al., 2014) to casual games. As shown in Figure A.9 (Appendix), the three effect sizes comparing an applied game to casual games ranged from –0.02 to 0.48. Notably, Fisher et al. (2015) and Loewy et al. (2016) reported significant effects favouring the applied game. Regarding the comparison of an active condition to casual games, the study of Holzer et al. (2014) showed a nonsignificant effect size of –0.24. Externalising Problems Three papers included participants with externalising problems, namely children with (symptoms of) foetal alcohol syndrome having problems with disruptive behaviours (Coles et al., 2015), youth with anger problems (Ducharme et al., 2021) and youth with both clinically elevated levels of anxiety and externalising problems (Schuurmans et al., 2018). The latter paper was also
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