Tetris

Emily Holmes and colleagues looked at how the game Tetris could be used as a ‘cognitive vaccine’ for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They thought playing the game within six hours of a trauma may help prevent the escalation of intrusive flashbacks.

The researchers recruited forty study participants, and divided them in to two groups of twenty. Both groups watched a twelve minute film of traumatic scenes. Thirty minutes after viewing the film the participants were assigned to an intervention or a non-intervention group.

Each participant, regardless of their groupcompleted baseline tasks, before watching a refresher of the trauma film. After this refresher film the intervention participants played Tetris for ten minutes. Non-intervention participants sat quietly for the same period of time. The number of trauma flash backs by each participant during this period was measured. Participants also kept a personal diary recording number of trauma flash backs for one week after viewing the trauma film.

The intervention group experienced slightly fewer traumatic flashbacks during the ten minutes they were playing the game. More interestingly, when data on the number of flashbacks experienced one week after viewing the film was measured, the group that played Tetris showed a significantly lower score for trauma flashbacks.