lmaooooooo!
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Video Game With Biofeedback Teaches Children to Curb Anger
Side Note: I find the application of these studies very important especially when it comes to early education. I feel like the future to how we control and use our emotions to benefit rather than be our dismay lies in studies like these that aim to train our brains to regulate and control emotions like any system would monitor itself for peak efficiency. If we can use the applicability and entertainment in video games to make children who have severe anger problems a thing of the past we could be tackling a major problem within early childhood, education and or both. A child with controlled emotions is more likely to focus naturally on the tasks at hand without the need of drugs that may or may not just worsen his or her situation and put them early on into drug reliance.
Children with serious anger problems can be helped by a video game that helps them learn how to regulate their emotions, according to a new study.
Image: Young Spock inside a Vulcan virtual reality educational system Credit: Star Trek (2009)
Noticing that children with anger control problems are often uninterested in psychotherapy, but eager to play video games, Jason Kahn, Ph.D., and Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, M.D., at Boston Children’s Hospital developed “RAGE Control,” a video game with a biofeedback component that helps children practice emotional control skills.
The game involves shooting at enemy spaceships while avoiding shooting at friendly ones. As children play, a monitor on one finger tracks their heart rate and displays it on the computer screen. When the heart rate goes above a certain level, players lose their ability to shoot at the enemy spaceships. To improve their game, they must learn to keep calm, the researchers explain.
“The connections between the brain’s executive control centers and emotional centers are weak in people with severe anger problems,” said Gonzalez-Heydrich, chief of Psychopharmacology at Boston Children’s and senior investigator on the study. “However, to succeed at RAGE Control, players have to learn to use these centers at the same time to score points.”
The study, led by first author Peter Ducharme, M.S.W., a clinical social worker at Boston Children’s, compared two groups of 9- to 17-year-old children admitted to the hospital’s Psychiatry Inpatient Service who had high levels of anger. To qualify for the study, the children had to have a normal IQ and not need a medication change during the five-day study period.
One group, with 19 children, received standard treatments for anger, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, presentation of relaxation techniques and social skills training for five consecutive business days. The second group, with 18 children, got these same treatments, but spent the last 15 minutes of their psychotherapy session playing RAGE Control.
After five sessions, the gamers were significantly better at keeping their heart rate down, the researchers report. They also showed clinically significant decreases in anger scores on the State Trait Anger Expression Inventory-Child and Adolescent (STAXI-CA). Specific decreases were seen in the intensity of anger at a particular time, the frequency of angry feelings over time, and the expression of anger towards others or objects. The gamers also had a decrease in suppressed, internalized anger, according to the researchers.
Tunes of CWL
Yasunori Mitsuda
Secret of the Forest
Played By Humans, Scored By Nature
Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should.
The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past.
“We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.”
“This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.”
And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against.
So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising!
Teens and Video Games: How Much Is Too Much?
The gamer community had a near-miss this week in Ohio, when a 15-year-old boy collapsed after playing “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” for up to five days straight.
The Columbus teen was rushed to the hospital with severe dehydration, where he recovered, according to a report from TV station WCMH on Aug. 7.
Players who delve too deeply into their electronic worlds can face various health risks, ranging from deep vein thrombosis, or blood clots, to severe dehydration.
For instance, in July, a Taiwanese teenager was found dead after sitting for 40 hours in an Internet cafe playing “Diablo 3.” At the time, doctors speculated he died from a heart attack caused by a blood clot that formed during the long session.
And last summer, a 20-year-old man from the U.K. died from a blood clot after spending 12-hour sessions on his Xbox. His father told “The Sun” newspaper, “He lived for his Xbox. I never dreamed he was in any danger.”
While these are extreme cases, they are a reminder that sitting at a computer or console for days, whether it’s for “World of Warcraft” or for work, isn’t healthy for anyone. But psychologists who study video games and kids say parents needn’t worry about the amount of time spent gaming, unless screen time starts to affect school, health or social life. (And, of course, a stint of tens of hours gaming is likely to negatively affect schoolwork and lead to social woes.) That said, researchers remain concerned about the effects of violent content in video games, which have been linked by many studies to aggressive behavior.
Too much screen time?
These days, screens of one kind or another occupy youth for 50 hours a week, a 2010 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation reports. “It’s a full-time job plus 10 hours of overtime, and that’s the average,” said Douglas Gentile, a psychologist and director of the Media Research Lab at Iowa State University.
Video-gaming consumed nine weekly hours for teens, the Kaiser survey found, while a Harris Poll conducted for Gentile during the same period reported 13 hours a week spent gaming on computers and consoles.
Laughing Octopus
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Underwater Theme
"Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman. Rise and shine. Not that I wish to imply you have been sleeping on the job. No-one is more deserving of a rest. And all the effort in the world would have gone to waste until… well, let’s just say your hour has come again. The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. So, wake up, Mr. Freeman. Wake up and smell the ashes."
G-Man - Half-Life 2
