Therapeutic play for emotional regulation

Play can be a solution for treating certain ailments. University students from Cluj have launched the REThink Life therapeutic game, which uses psychology to train specific emotional regulation skills, made within a project with European funding. The project director, university professor Dr. Oana David stated: "It is a project that we will run in the next two and a half years, which was financed by PNRR and which will be coordinated by our current colleague, university professor Dr. Agnieszka Sorokovska. In the project we will explore the relationships between olfactory abilities, the quality of the microbiome and subjective well-being. We are psychologists and we are very interested in this component of well-being and we will measure a series of variables connected to it, such as life satisfaction, relationship functioning, depressive mood, anxious mood and how they relate to aspects of olfactory abilities We will conduct a series of studies using various methodologies, some cross-sectional, very importantly - one of these methodologies will include a longitudinal exploration of how in which in a dynamic manner establish these relations with well-being and we hope that this will contribute to the knowledge we have about the ways in which individual well-being can be multiplied". According to the specialists from Cluj, who worked for ten years on the development of the game, it is composed of four levels, each training a distinct ability to regulate emotions. The characters in the game are real, members of the lab, which helps to "increase the ecological validity and difficulty within certain levels". The project budget has a total value of 6,000,000 lei.