Gaming in moderation linked to better mental health: Study
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Despite concerns that video games promote violence, impair socialization and can lead to addiction, a study from Nihon University in Tokyo found that gaming — as long as it’s for no more than three hours per day — can help improve mental health.
Researchers studied responses from more than 97,000 people following a shortage of PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch consoles in Japan between 2020 and 2022 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Daily Mail.
The shortage led retailers to implement a lottery system for doling out consoles to people between the ages of 10 and 69.
The study suggested that owning one of the consoles and playing games were linked to improved mental well-being. Owning a console was also tied to an increase in life satisfaction and a reduction in psychological stress, the Daily Mail reported.
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Researchers, however, also said the effects of the pandemic may have skewed the results.
“Through a natural experimental approach, we demonstrated that winning a lottery for a Switch or PS5 positively impacted mental well-being for individuals aged 10-69 in Japan,” researchers said in the Nature Human Behaviour journal.
“All our estimates indicated positive correlations between video-gaming and life satisfaction — a finding that, while counterintuitive given certain public perceptions around gaming, is consistent with recent studies.”
The findings also offered some “interesting nuance,” experts told the Daily Mail, with Nintendo Switch ownership associated with better outcomes for younger gamers and “slightly favouring” female participants.
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“Whereas PS5 ownership was associated with more pronounced outcomes in males and adult populations without children,” Pete Etchells, a psychology and science communication professor at Bath Spa University, told the Daily Mail.
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Another expert told the Daily Mail that understanding the “benefits of play is good for everyone, particularly when it comes to video games, which suffer from an image problem globally.”
Overexposure to video games has been linked to poor sleep in kids and can affect attention, academic performance and mood, according to the Akron Children’s Hospital, while the World Health Organization has characterized uncontrolled gaming as a health condition.
However, a 2022 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that video games like Minecraft can have a positive effect on kids, too, including better performance on cognitive skills tests involving impulse control and working memory.
“Video games are not just important for children, but for adults of all ages and are becoming increasingly important for older generations as a source of social connection and mental challenge,” King’s College London computer science lecturer Mike Cook told the Daily Mail.
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