People with social anxiety may find relief in a smartphone game that helps shift their attention away from intimidating or negative cues towards positive ones. Researchers found that playing it several times a week significantly reduced social anxiety scores compared with using a sham version.
Brief, game-based therapies like this can fill major gaps in public access to mental health treatments, says at The City University of New York.
People with social anxiety – the – feel intense distress about being judged in social situations, which can hamper their day-to-day function. But few socially anxious people receive behavioural or medical treatments, probably because they can be time-consuming, expensive and sometimes ineffective, says Dennis-Tiwary.
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Over the past few years, scientists like Dennis-Tiwary have tried to address what she considers a “dire need” for more accessible therapies by developing computer-based attention bias modification, which aims to downplay the brain’s focus on social threats. “It’s sort of like recalibrating your filter on the world, to let in more of the positive, instead of fixating only on the negative,” she says.
To make the technique more engaging, Dennis-Tiwary and her colleagues have created a gaming app called , which involves showing players pleasant facial expressions alongside unpleasant ones, and then awarding them points for reacting quickly to the pleasant ones.
Putting the game to the test, the team recruited 104 adults aged 22 to 64 with high levels of social anxiety, as measured on a for the condition commonly used in clinical trials. They had to play either StarStarter or a sham version that sometimes rewards players for focusing on threatening facial expressions instead of happy ones.
After using the app for four 12-minute sessions a week across four weeks, those who played the actual game – currently only available by referral from health resources, such as doctors or wellness centres – were more than three times as likely to experience a clinically meaningful reduction in social anxiety compared with those playing the sham version. They also experienced continued improvements throughout the month. Those in the sham group improved slightly in the first two weeks, but after that there was no change.
at Florida International University says the results are exciting, especially since he and his colleagues have , but less so in everyday environments. “What makes this study stand out is that it highlights a low-intensity, easily accessible tool that could complement existing treatments and reach a broader range of people,” he says.
The lead researchers have a financial interest in the app, but Pettit says that doesn’t undermine the findings. “Collaboration between researchers and commercial developers is essential to translating science into real-world impact,” he says.
Journal of Anxiety Disorders
