Can we use serious games to enhance “emotion regulation” capacity in adolescents as a protective strategy against drug abuse? an overview of systematic reviews

There are some original and review articles that have investigated the effect of serious games on emotion regulation capacity. In present study, to prepare an evidence-based guide for planning and decision making, we aimed to overview the related systematic reviews to response to this question: can we use serious games to enhance “emotion regulation” capacity in adolescents as a protective strategy against addiction. Using both above mentioned search terms, we found 1979 potential references. After removing duplicates, and screening based on the title, abstract and full text, five systematic reviews met our eligibility criteria. Two of them were more relevant to the first study question (i.e. if we can prevent and treat drug abuse by enhancing emotion regulation capacity and three of them were relevant to the second study question (i.e. if we can enhance emotion regulation capacity using serious games). In sum we can say that serious games potentially can be used to enhance “emotion regulation” capacity in adolescents as a protective strategy against drug abuse. However, given the scarcity of works that directly assessed the effect of serious games on drug abuse, it needs to be studied in future research with high quality methodology.