Paying for loot boxes is linked to problem gambling, regardless of specific features such as cash-out and pay-to-win

Loot boxes are items in video games that may be bought with real-world money but contain randomised contents. Due to similarities between loot boxes and gambling, various countries are considering regulating them to reduce gambling-related harm. However, loot boxes are extremely diverse. A key problem facing regulators is determining whether specific types of loot boxes carry more potential for harm, and should be regulated accordingly. In this study, we specify seven key ways that loot boxes may differ from each other: They may involve paid or unpaid openings; give opportunities for cashing out; allow gamers to pay to win; involve the use of an in-game currency; feature crate and key mechanics; show near misses; and contain exclusive items. We then use a large-scale preregistered correlational analysis (n=1200) to determine if any of these features strengthen the link between loot box spending and problem gambling. Our results indicate that being able to cash out, showing near-misses, and letting players use in-game currency to buy loot boxes may weakly strengthen the relationship between loot box spending and problem gambling. However, our main conclusion is that regardless of the presence or absence of specific features of loot boxes, if they are being sold to players for real-world money, then their purchase is linked to problem gambling

The effects of threat on complex decision-making:evidence from a virtual environment

Individuals living and working in dangerous settings (e.g., first responders and military personnel) make complex decisions amidst serious threats. However, controlled studies on decision-making under threat are limited given obvious ethical concerns. Here, we embed a complex decision-making task within a threatening, immersive virtual environment. Based on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a paradigm widely used to study complex decision-making, the task requires participants to make a series of choices to escape a collapsing building. In Study 1 we demonstrate that, as with the traditional IGT, participants learn to make advantageous decisions over time and that their behavioural data can be described by reinforcement-learning based computational models. In Study 2 we created threatening and neutral versions of the environment. In the threat condition, participants performed worse, taking longer to improve from baseline and scoring lower through the final trials. Computational modelling further revealed that participants in the threat condition were more responsive to short term rewards and less likely to perseverate on a given choice. These findings suggest that when threat is integral to decision-making, individuals make more erratic choices and focus on short term gains. They furthermore demonstrate the utility of virtual environments for making threat integral to cognitive tasks

Theories, methodologies, and effects of affect-adaptive games : a systematic review

Affect-adaptive games gained in popularity over the last years in human computer interactions studies, promising potential benefits for player experience, performance, and even health. It is however not yet clear how affective games are being evaluated, what the precise effects are, and how they are based on emotion theoretical concepts that are still not universally agreed upon. This systematic review investigated these questions by analysing relevant high-quality evaluation studies of the effect of affect-adaptive video games on various outcomes in regards to their effects, theoretical assumptions, and methodologies. Out of 3,930 papers, 26 studies were included based on preregistered inclusion and exclusion criteria. A high variance regarding theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches was observed, as well as an overall poor methodological rigour, leading to the conclusion that more work is needed in constructing better methodological standards for game evaluation studies and theoretical considerations when developing and testing affect-adaptive video games

Parents reinforce the formation of first impressions in conversation with their children

The tendency to form first impressions from facial appearance emerges early in development. One route through which these impressions may be learned is parent-child interaction. In Study 1, 24 parent-child dyads (children aged 5–6 years, 50% male, 83% White British) were given four computer generated faces and asked to talk about each of the characters shown. Study 2 (children aged 5–6 years, 50% male, 92% White British) followed a similar procedure using images of real faces. Across both studies, around 13% of conversation related to the perceived traits of the individuals depicted. Furthermore, parents actively reinforced their children’s face-trait mappings, agreeing with the opinions they voiced on approximately 40% of occasions across both studies. Interestingly, although parents often encouraged face-trait mappings in their children, their responses to questionnaire items suggested they typically did not approve of judging others based on their appearance

The Underwood Project : A Virtual Environment for Eliciting Ambiguous Threat

Threatening environments can be unpredictable in many different ways. The nature of threats, their timing, and their locations in a scene can all be uncertain, even when one is acutely aware of being at risk. Prior research demonstrates that both temporal unpredictability and spatial uncertainty of threats elicit a distinctly anxious psychological response. In the paradigm presented here, we further explore other facets of ambiguous threat via an environment in which there are no concrete threats, predictable or otherwise, but which nevertheless elicits a building sense of danger. By incorporating both psychological research and principles of emotional game design, we constructed this world and then tested its effects in three studies. In line with our goals, participants experienced the environment as creepy and unpredictable. Their subjective and physiological response to the world rose and fell in line with the presentation of ambiguously threatening ambient cues. Exploratory analyses further suggest that this ambiguously threatening experience influenced memory for the virtual world and its underlying narrative. Together the data demonstrate that naturalistic virtual worlds can effectively elicit a multifaceted experience of ambiguous threat with subjective and cognitive consequences

Avatars with faces of real people: A construction method for scientific experiments in virtual reality

Experimental psychology research typically employs methods that greatly simplify the real-world conditions within which cognition occurs. This approach has been successful for isolating cognitive processes, but cannot adequately capture how perception operates in complex environments. In turn, real-world environments rarely afford the access and control required for rigorous scientific experimentation. In recent years, technology has advanced to provide a solution to these problems, through the development of affordable high-capability virtual reality (VR) equipment. The application of VR is now increasing rapidly in psychology, but the realism of its avatars, and the extent to which they visually represent real people, is captured poorly in current VR experiments. Here, we demonstrate a user-friendly method for creating photo-realistic avatars of real people and provide a series of studies to demonstrate their psychological characteristics. We show that avatar faces of familiar people are recognised with high accuracy (Study 1), replicate the familiarity advantage typically observed in real-world face matching (Study 2), and show that these avatars produce a similarity-space that corresponds closely with real photographs of the same faces (Study 3). These studies open the way to conducting psychological experiments on visual perception and social cognition with increased realism in VR

The relationship between individual variation in macroscale functional gradients and distinct aspects of ongoing thought

Contemporary accounts of ongoing thought recognise it as a heterogeneous and multidimensional construct, varying in both form and content. An emerging body of evidence demonstrates that distinct types of experience are associated with unique neurocognitive profiles, that can be described at the whole-brain level as interactions between multiple large scale networks. The current study sought to explore the possibility that whole-brain functional connectivity patterns at rest may be meaningfully related to patterns of ongoing thought that occurred over this period. Participants underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) followed by a questionnaire retrospectively assessing the content and form of their ongoing thoughts during the scan. A non-linear dimension reduction algorithm was applied to the rs-fMRI data to identify components explaining the greatest variance in whole brain connectivity patterns, and ongoing thought patterns during the resting-state were measured retrospectively at the end of the scan. Multivariate analyses revealed that individuals for whom the connectivity of the sensorimotor system was maximally distinct from the visual system were most likely to report thoughts related to finding solutions to problems or goals and least likely to report thoughts related to the past. These results add to an emerging literature that suggests that unique patterns of experience are associated with distinct distributed neurocognitive profiles and highlight that unimodal systems may play an important role in this process

Socio-Affective versus Socio-Cognitive Mental Trainings Differentially Affect Emotion Regulation Strategies

A variety of contemplative practices putatively improves the ability to deal with difficult emotions. However, it is unclear how these different types of mental training differentially affect the use of different emotion regulation strategies. We addressed this question in a 9-month longitudinal study in which participants (N = 332) took part in three distinct 3-month mental training modules cultivating attentional (the Presence module), socio-cognitive (the Perspective module), and socio-affective, compassion-based skills (the Affect module). In addition, the participants completed the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) and the Brief “COPE” questionnaire at baseline and after every module. The Presence module did not notably change the use of any emotion regulation strategies, whereas the Perspective and the Affect modules both increased the use of acceptance. Moreover, the Perspective module was especially effective in increasing the use of adaptive, cognitive transformations such as reappraisal, perspective taking, and planning, whereas the Affect module uniquely led to decreases in maladaptive avoidant strategies such as distraction and refocusing. These findings imply that, a) cultivating present moment focused attention might not be sufficient to change emotion regulation strategies, b) different types of mental practices focusing on either cognitive perspective taking or socio-motivational capacities lead to adaptive emotion regulation via different strategies, and c) specifically cultivating positive affect and compassion can decrease avoidance of difficult emotions. This research suggests that different mental-training exercises affect the use of specific emotion regulation strategies and that clinical interventions should be designed accordingly

Unobtrusive tracking of interpersonal orienting and distance predicts the subjective quality of social interactions

Interpersonal coordination of behaviour is essential for smooth social interactions. Measures of interpersonal behaviour, however, often rely on subjective evaluations, invasive measurement techniques or gross measures of motion. Here, we constructed an unobtrusive motion tracking system that enables detailed analysis of behaviour at the individual and interpersonal levels, which we validated using wearable sensors. We evaluate dyadic measures of joint orienting and distancing, synchrony and gaze behaviours to summarize data collected during natural conversation and joint action tasks. Our results demonstrate that patterns of proxemic behaviours, rather than more widely used measures of interpersonal synchrony, best predicted the subjective quality of the interactions. Increased distance between participants predicted lower enjoyment, while increased joint orienting towards each other during cooperation correlated with increased effort reported by the participants. Importantly, the interpersonal distance was most informative of the quality of interaction when task demands and experimental control were minimal.These results suggest that interpersonal measures of behaviour gathered during minimally constrained social interactions are particularly sensitive for the subjective quality of social interactions and may be useful for interaction-based phenotyping for further studies