Speaker

Presentation Info

Title

Are You Depressed or Understandably Miserable? Emotional Health Through Game-Based and Digital Biomarker Approaches

Summary

Diagnosing depression remains a major challenge. We still rely on subjective questionnaires and interviews, with almost no biological or objective grounding. This leads us to place under the same label two very different experiences: individuals with a genuine depressive disorder, and people who are, quite understandably, miserable in response to life circumstances. These groups do not present with the same mechanisms, do not follow the same trajectory, and should not be treated through the same lens. Yet our current diagnostic tools force them together. This confusion affects everything: research outcomes, treatment decisions, and how people interpret their own emotional state. When we fail to separate biological depression from contextual suffering, we risk both over-medicalising normal distress and overlooking those who actually need deeper clinical intervention. In this presentation, I will argue that a new approach is needed, and that game-based or gamified cognitive evaluation may offer exactly this shift. By embedding cognitive tasks within engaging, interactive game mechanics, we can capture subtle neurobehavioral signals that are extremely difficult to detect with traditional questionnaires. Patterns of attention, flexibility, learning, effort, and error monitoring differ meaningfully between biological depression and situational misery, and a digital approach allow us to measure these dynamics in a natural, immersive way. This offers a potential digital biomarker capable of improving differentiation where current tools fail. The goal is to strengthen diagnostic precision in a way that directly benefits research, improves clinical decision-making, and ultimately supports more coherent care pathways for individuals whose needs are very different but currently indistinguishable in standard assessments.

Keynote

Presentation

GFHEU Year

2026