By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering


American Public Media's Marketplace reported yesterday on work published last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by McGill researcher Mark Baldwin.

Baldwin and his team put together a special type of video game to help train people to perceive positive social situations more readily. Marketplace's description of the game has players select the one smiling face out of a larger number of total faces presented as an array. As in most games, users' skills increase with practice. And as players become better at picking out positive faces in the virtual matrix, something surprising happens -- players' levels of the stress hormone cortisol decrease. By as much as 17% in a recent study of 23 call center employees living in or around Montréal.

Who says video games are bad for you?

Baldwin's work has lead to the creation of a new startup named MindHabits, recently awarded funding to bring a commercial version of this and other social awareness games to market. Check out the website to play a demo version of the game ... though note that the site seems to be having some trouble this morning ...