Playing With Emotions: Evaluating a Serious Game to Promote Parents' Emotional Competencies Within the Family Context

ABSTRACT Background Video games can be innovative, educational and therapeutic tools that have demonstrated positive outcomes in enhancing emotional skills. Many of these programmes have shown benefits in improving children and adolescents' emotional competencies, but there is a lack of research evidence on programmes that aim to intervene within the family context, putting the focus directly on parents. Objectives The present study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of Happy for Families , a serious game developed to work on families' emotional competencies. Methods A total of 129 Spanish parents, aged 34–60 (83.7% women), were evaluated to explore pretest and posttest measures of the competencies of emotional awareness and regulation, cognitive emotion regulation strategies, parental stress and life satisfaction. Parents were divided into three groups: parents who played with their children (PC), parents who played alone (P) and a control group. Results and Conclusions The results evidenced that after the interaction with Happy for Families , the PC group reported increments in emotional awareness and regulation, as well as in the use of refocus on planning and positive reappraisal strategies compared to the P and the control group. No significant differences were found related to parental stress and satisfaction. Although future implementations of the video game would need to work on increasing the engagement of parents individually and not only in interaction with their children, these findings suggest that video games can be promising and easy‐to‐use tools to nurture parents' emotional competencies within the family setting.