A Rage Video Game to Restrain Angry Kids

Managing angry children is a pretty tough job. Trying to solving this problem, researchers have developed a video game that can help children in controlling their emotions.

Researchers Dr. Jason Kahn and Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich at Boston Children's Hospital created a video game, "RAGE Control" for teaching children to manage their emotional control skills in difficult life situations.

The game requires players to shoot at enemy spaceships, by avoiding friendly spaceships. A monitor attached to the game displays the player's heart rate on the computer screen. It's mandatory for the player to maintain calmness as the heart rate above a certain level decreases his/her shooting capacity.

"The connections between the brain's executive control centers and emotional centers are weak in people with severe anger problems," Gonzalez-Heydrich, chief of Psychopharmacology at Boston Children's and senior investigator on the study, said in a statement. "However, to succeed at RAGE Control, players have to learn to use these centers at the same time to score points."

To examine effectiveness of the game, a team of researchers led by Peter Ducharme, a clinical social worker at Boston Children's analyzed two groups of patients, aged between nine and 17 with high level of anger at the Psychiatry Inpatient Service of the hospital.

Both the groups underwent normal treatment for anger like cognitive-behavioral therapy, presentation of relaxation techniques and social skills training for five consecutive business days.  In addition to the above treatment, the second group (18 children) was asked to play the game for 15 minutes.

At the end of the study, children who played the video game were found successful in managing their anger compared to the other group.

"Kids reported feeling better control of their emotions when encountering day to day frustrations on the unit," Ducharme explained. "While this was a pilot study, and we weren't able to follow the kids after they were discharged, we think the game will help them control their emotions in other environments."

The study has been published online Oct. 24 in Adolescent Psychiatry.