The Effects of Emotions and Their Regulation on Decision-making Performance in Affective (Digital) Serious Games - Petar Jerčić

1. GAMES FOR HEALTH EUROPE CONFERENCE 2018
The Effects of Emotions and
Their Regulation on Decision-
making Performance in Affective
(Digital) Serious Games
Petar Jerčić
petar.jercic@bth.se
Department of Creative Technologies
Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), Sweden

2. Introduction
• Emotions critically influence human decision-making and
performance.
• Emotion-regulation - mitigate emotion-related decision biases and
lead to better decision performance.
• Serious games - a new angle to practicing emotion-regulation, where
biofeedback communicates emotional states on-line to gameplay
choices.
• In the decision context of serious games, players would benefit from
awareness and regulation of such emerging emotions.

3. Problem definition
• Validated (traditional) self-guided interventions (i.e., meditation,
cognitive based therapy, and yoga)
• High dropout rates - unengaging nature of exercises and lack of motivation.
• Quiet, controlled settings, which may not generalize to the context of real-
world stressors.
• Limited capacity for self-monitoring.
• Serious games - a remedy to traditional approaches
• Encourage players to more intensely engage with content.
• Provide a context for the on-line perception of emotional responses, through
physiology and biofeedback.

4. Background
• Russell’s model classifies emotions:
• Valence - positive or negative emotional
states.
• Arousal - level of excitement.
• Physiological responses and correlation:
• Electrocardiography (ECG) - physiological
valence.
• Galvanic skin response (GSR) - physiological
arousal.
• Pupil diameter (PD) – both.

5. Two serious game interventions

6. Serious game #1
• The Tower of Hanoi game is
originally a single player game.
• In a collaborative gameplay,
human-human or human-robot
took turns to complete the game.
• This decision consisted of just one
possible optimal step to move a
disk towards the final
configuration, and a non-optimal
step which would be corrected by
the collaborator, providing an
immediate feedback on the
outcome of a decision.

7. Serious game #2
• The Auction Game biofeedback
serious game.
• Presents a challenging decision-
making task to the participants.
• Directly indicating their
physiological arousal state via
the on-line biofeedback (based
on the online assessment of HR
values - ECG sensor), offering
interospection.

8. Results (1)
• The worse performing participants reported higher arousal values
after each round
• The collaborator conditions significantly affected the performance
when physiological arousal was lower, with better performance
associated with both robot collaborators compared to the Human
Collaborator.
• The participants were found to perform the task equally well
regardless of the physiological valence found

9. Results (2)
• Left: average decision performance depending on their state of arousal.
• Right: average arousal during the game levels, grey successfully finished
the game reaching final level.

10. Results (3)
• The maximum PD occurring across
the HR values for the decision-
making task, 4.11 mm occurring for
the HR of 106.67 BPM.
• The normalized PD responses in
relation to the HR on a decision-
making task in the serious game.

11. Conclusions
Traditional methods:
• Cognitive-reappraisal strategy - more efficient decision performance and
reaction time.
• Arousal vs. valence - optimal arousal, a further increase by regulating valence.
• Better performance was associated with the robot collaborators compared to the human
ones, only for the ''lower'' physiological arousal group.
• Careful when designing serious games which elicit high physiological arousal - may be
disruptive for the task.
Serious games added value:
• Correct context for the decision-making task, higher emotion-regulation skill
acquisition.
• Mapping the underlying mechanism of emotions - the interplay between
sympathetic and parasympathetic pathway activation - indicated the cognitive
abilities of the participants in the context of a challenging decision-making task.

12. Keypoints
• The presented approach shows that it is possible to design and
develop such serious game applications that provide a supportive
environment where decision-makers can practice emotion-regulation
and subsequently improve their performance on the decision-making
tasks.
• These findings could provide a step towards providing a biofeedback
for the participants to shape awareness of their own cognitive and
emotional abilities.
• Usage of physiological signals in serious games could make possible
the tailoring of serious games to the cognitive abilities of an individual
participant – player centered design.

13. Q&A
The Effects of Emotions and Their Regulation on Decision–making
Performance in Affective (Digital) Serious Games
Petar Jerčić
petar.jercic@bth.se
Department of Creative Technologies
Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), Sweden