Presentation
Beat the Bots: Exploring the Effects of Placebo/Nocebo Manipulation on Performance During Video Gameplay
SessionvPOS1: Poster Gallery
Event Type
Poster
Virtual
TimeTuesday, October 26th10:00am - 10:50am EDT
LocationVirtual 1
DescriptionThis study investigates placebos/nocebos and video games' usefulness as psychological research tools. One underlying mechanism of the placebo/nocebo effect is participants’ expectation of treatment effects. Such expectation effects exist in sports psychology and healthcare domains, but inconsistent findings have emerged on whether similar effects impact a participants' cognitive performance. Concurrently, using video games as task environments is an emerging methodology relating to expertise, emotional regulation, and large-scale behavioral data collection. Therefore, this study examines the expectancy effect as induced by instructions on in-game performance. The two instructional expectancy conditions are (1) situation framed in-game emoting versus a control group (e.g., emoting under the pretense of subsequent performance increases) and (2) three different group win-rate expectations. Data collection is currently ongoing. It is hypothesized that individual performance, including creep score and match length, will differ among the expectancy conditions. This instructional expectancy effect and video games as research tools are discussed.