Can Entertaining Games Be A Way To Relieve Depression?

There were 54 million patients diagnosed with depression in China,and women and college students are the most prevalent.When early young patients are suspecting or suffering from depressive symptoms,they may be reluctant to go directly to a psychiatric clinic because of their shame on diseases.On the other hand,even if they would be willing to accept daily interventions,there is no direct access to professional self-help interventions such as serious games for them.In this case,they are more likely to attempt simple self-mediation through common entertainment games.However,the effect of this game intervention on the relief of depression symptoms is actually difficult to judge,because for depression,it is not only negative emotions that need to be resolved,but also deeper negative cognitive factors.This study is based on the social reality above.After reviewing related research on game intervention and depression,the study believes that game entertainment experience is an important factor that may ease negative automatic thoughts when being in depression.In order to effectively intervene to the symptoms of depression,if we can understand how different game entertainment experiences affect the relationship of automatic thinking processing through the findings of this study,we can provide more accurate game-assisted treatment in the early psychological intervention of depression which is fully supported by empirical outcomes.Therefore,by conducting an offline survey on more than 600 female college students from six colleges in a certain university in Shenzhen,and using the control experiment method in the middle and late stages of the study,the research investigated these following questions: First,is there existing a special gameplay pattern and motivation when depressive females are playing games;Second,what type of games can alleviate the negative emotions,or even the negative effects on automatic thoughts in the short run;Third,can eudainomic gaming experience predict negative automatic thoughts from depression?This study found that:(1)the experimental group using eudainomic games can effectively reduce the generation of negative emotions,but the pure hedonic games have a more significant effect in alleviating the negative automatic thoughts of depression;(2)when females with depression inclination are playing no matter what kind of game interventions,they will show a higher level of tension than healthy players,but by implementing eudainomic games,they will be able to relax better without the fatigue from continuous gameplay;(3)the meaningful emotions in games can both significantly affect the activation of gamers’ central values and their feeling of autonomy.But only when the autonomy is highly activated,meaningful affect can significantly reduce the level of negative automatic thoughts.