PTSD And Video Games: Attention-Controlling Games Help Curb Symptoms

New findings published in the American Journal of Psychiatry reveal that a computerized attention-control program could significantly help reduce combat veterans' preoccupation with threat and attendant PTSD symptoms. However, researchers also found that another type of computerized training, known as attention bias modification--which has proven helpful in treating anxiety disorders--did not reduce PTSD symptoms.

For the study, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Israeli researchers conducted parallel trials that tested the two treatments in the United States and Israeli combat veterans.

Findings revealed that symptoms could be reduced by reducing attention bias variability, in a news release. 

While attention modification bias trains attention either away from or toward a threat, attention-control training implicitly teaches participants that threatening stimuli are irrelevant to performing their task.

Yet attention control training balances certain experienced moment-to-moment fluctuations in attention bias from threat vigilance to threat avoidance, which correlate with the severity of PTSD symptoms. Furthermore, this correlated with the severity of PTSD symptoms and distinguished PTSD patients from healthy controls and those with social anxiety or acute stress disorders.

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