Videogame play and events are related to unhealthy emotion regulation in the form of low fading affect bias in autobiographical memory

Abstract

The Fading Affect Bias (FAB) is faster fading of unpleasant affect than pleasant affect. The FAB is negatively related to unhealthy outcomes and positively related to healthy outcomes. As videogames elicit strong emotions in players, we used retrospective methodology to examine the relation of the FAB to healthy and unhealthy variables for videogame and non-videogame events. We found robust FAB effects that were negatively related to unhealthy variables, which supported contemporary emotion regulation theories. Furthermore, the FAB was larger for non-videogame events than for videogame events, and frequent videogame play related to low FAB for videogame events; these results connected videogame play with poor emotion regulation. Unexpectedly, high levels of both gaming addiction and depression yielded high FAB. The complex FAB effects and the fact that rehearsal mediated them replicated past FAB findings across various events, and they extended these results to the context of videogames.

Keywords: Fading affect; Rehearsal; Unhealthy outcomes; Videogames.