Isabela Granic

Radboud University
 http://isabelagranic.com/

Isabela Granic got her PhD at the University of Toronto in developmental psychology. She is currently Professor and Chair in the Developmental Psychopathology department in the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University, in the Netherlands. She is also Director of the Games for Emotional and Mental Health (GEMH) lab, a large, multidisciplinary research and development lab for designing and testing applied games for mental health. By integrating clinical and developmental research with interactive media design, she is driven to create a suite of evidence-based games that are also commercially viable and can be widely deployed to prevent and treat anxiety, depression, and addiction in young people and families. She is funded by research grants from national science foundations in North America and Europe. Dr. Granic has published over 75 articles with results from these funded projects which have appeared in the highest impact journals in neuroscience, developmental science, and clinical psychology.

Selected Publications:

  • Scholten, H., & Granic I. (2019). Use of the principles of design thinking to address limitations of digital mental health interventions for youth. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 21:e11528. doi: 10.2196/11528
  • Granic, I., Lobel, A., & Engels, R. (2014). The benefits of playing video games. American Psychologist, 69, 66-78
  • Poppelaars, M., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Kleinjan, M., & Granic, I. (2018). The impact of explicit mental health messages in video games on players’motivation and affect. Computers in Human Behaviour. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2018.01.019
  • Schoneveld, E. A., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A. & Granic, I. (2018). Preventing Childhood Anxiety Disorders: Is an Applied Game as Effective as a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-Based Program? Prevention Science, 19, 220-232.

Social Profiles

All Sessions by Isabela Granic

  • 19. Nov | Conference Opening

    The conference kick-off will include the opening keynote as well as the Young Academics Workshop

  • 16:15  - 17:00
    Depression and anxiety are the most frequently diagnosed mental health problems, leading to devastating long-term outcomes that affect a huge proportion of children and adolescents across the globe. Effective prevention programs that show more than a small effect size and that do not stigmatize, condescend to, and bore children, are urgently needed. Our research program focuses on developing evidence-based games that promote emotional resilience through training skills while youth are immersed in games they love to play. We prioritize design and art, integrate developmental science and principles of behavioral change, and systematically test our gaming interventions with large-scale randomized controlled trials. In this talk I will: (a) describe the cross-disciplinary framework we use to develop mobile and virtual reality games that integrate biofeedback and evidence-based game mechanics, (b) present data from a series of randomized controlled trials that evaluate games that use biofeedback at their core (e.g., EEG neurofeedback, heart rate); and (c) introduce a roadmap to the next five years of programmatic studies in biofeedback games, emphasizing how our design and research methodology can help establish a validated toolbox of mechanics relevant to a wide range of interventions and mental health domains.
    19. Nov | Young Academics Workshop
    Where
    room 204

  • 21. Nov | Main Conference Day

    The main day of the Clash of Realities will feature renowned speakers from all around the globe.

  • 11:30  - 12:15
    Currently, young people—having grown up with tablets in their cribs and phones in their high chairs—no longer experience their digital, online interactions and physical, offline ones as functionally distinct. Instead, young people are living their everyday lives in a dynamic, ever-evolving digital environment that is woven together with offline experiences in a single hybrid ecosystem. And yet most of psychological research simplifies this dynamic, hybrid time as “screen time” and tries to correlate it with mental health outcomes. I will suggest an altogether different approach to both psychological research and digital design. I start with the simple premise that to understand the impact of digital experiences on young people, we need to examine how their developmental needs and goals are met by these experiences. Specifically, understanding how we build and share our narrative identity – the story about our self– can help pinpoint the digital experiences that will contribute to both healthy development as well as the emergence of serious mental health concerns. I will show how this narrative identity framework provides a useful scaffold for integrating a broad range of design concerns that are emerging in the next generation of social digital experiences. My hope is to provide digital designers with concrete scientific principles and practices for building hybrid experiences that tap and amplify our storytelling impulses. If psychological scientists increasingly partner and participate in the development of the next iteration of digital tools of all kinds (games, social media platforms, VR/AR), we will have a better chance of providing young people with safe, enriching, identity-relevant online environments that feel authentic and relevant to their core needs and values.
    21. Nov | Keynotes on the Main Conference Day
    Where
    Cinema Lecture Hall

  • 12:15  - 13:00
    Town Hall Talk. Moderated by Gundolf Freyermuth
    21. Nov | Keynotes on the Main Conference Day
    Where
    Cinema Lecture Hall




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Isabela Granic