Effect of the “Art Coloring” Online Coloring Game on Subjective Well-Being Increase and Anxiety Reduction During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development and Evaluation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has spread worldwide and generated tremendous stress on human beings. Unfortunately, it is often hard for distressed individuals to access mental health services under conditions of restricted movement or even lockdown. OBJECTIVE: The study first aims to develop an online digital intervention package based on a commercially released coloring game. The second aim is to test the effectiveness of difference intervention packages for players to increase subjective well-being (SWB) and reduce anxiety during the pandemic. METHODS: An evidence-based coloring intervention package was developed and uploaded to an online coloring game covering almost 1.5 million players worldwide in January 2021. Players worldwide participated to color either 4 rounds of images characterized by awe, pink, nature, and blue or 4 rounds of irrelevant images. Participants' SWB and anxiety and the perceived effectiveness of the game in reducing anxiety (subjective effectiveness [SE]) were assessed 1 week before the intervention (T1), after the participants completed pictures in each round (T2-T5), and after the intervention (T6). Independent 2-tailed t tests were conducted to examine the general intervention (GI) effect and the intervention effect of each round. Univariate analysis was used to examine whether these outcome variables were influenced by the number of rounds completed. RESULTS: In total, 1390 players worldwide responded and completed at least 1 assessment. Overall, the GI group showed a statistical significantly greater increase in SWB than the general control (GC) group (N=164, t162=3.59, Cohen d=0.59, 95% CI 0.36-1.24, P<.001). Compared to the control group, the best effectiveness of the intervention group was seen in the awe round, in which the increase in SWB was significant (N=171, t169=2.51, Cohen d=0.39, 95% CI 0.10-0.82, P=.01), and players who colored all 4 pictures had nearly significant improvements in SWB (N=171, F4,170=2.34, partial ŋ2=0.053, P=.06) and a significant decrease in anxiety (N=171, F4,170=3.39, partial ŋ2=0.075, P=.01). CONCLUSIONS: These data indicate the effectiveness of online psychological interventions, such as coloring games, for mental health in the specific period. They also show the feasibility of applying existing commercial games embedded with scientific psychological interventions that can fill the gap in mental crises and services for a wider group of people during the pandemic. The results would inspire innovations to prevent the psychological problems caused by public emergencies and encourage more games, especially the most popular ones, to take more positive action for the common crises of humankind.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".