For some people the thought of delivering a speech in front of a crowd of people is more frightening than the fear of death itself. Unfortunately, this fear can be incompatible with certain professional paths.

Psychological research has shown that insecurity feelings derive in large part from anxieties about whether one will be liked, accepted, and respected by one's peers and significant others. Sometimes people are aware of these concerns, but often social insecurities of this type influence people's thoughts and feelings "automatically", without a lot of deliberate thought and sometimes even entirely outside of their awareness. All they experience are negative reactions to the self or to social situations.

People with fewer insecurities seem to have a range of automatic thought processes that make them confident and buffer them from worrying about the possibility of social rejection. Fortunately, recent research shows that with enough practice, even people with low self-esteem can develop these beneficial thought processes that might allow them to gradually become more secure and self-confident and less prone to social anxieties such as fear of public speaking.

Mind Habits, a video game designed to help train people to change their perception of social threats and boost their self-confidence has now also been shown to reduce the production of the stress hormone cortisol. Through repetitive playing, the game trains the mind to orient more toward positive aspects of social life, reducing the impact of related stress and leaving people more free to deal with their real stresses in a more relaxed state of mind.

"Many kinds of performance—whether intellectual, creative, or athletic—can be undermined by distracting thoughts about potential social evaluation and criticism," said Dr. Baldwin, whose team created the video games that are marketed by his company Mind Habits, "Among golfers, for example, it is understood that when you hit a bad shot, you have to ‘shrug it off’ and shift your focus to the next shot. You can’t get caught up in self-criticisms and in worries about what other people might think."

In a recent study at McGill University, Mind Habits recruited 23 employees of a telemarketing call centre to play one of their games, which involves clicking on the one smiling face among many frowning faces on a screen as quickly as possible. The new findings appear in the October issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The call-centre employees did this each workday morning for a week. They filled out daily stress and self-esteem questionnaires and had their cortisol levels tested through saliva analysis on the final day of the experiment. These tests showed an average 17 percent reduction in cortisol production compared to a control group that played a similar game but without the smiling faces. Since cortisol is associated with heart-related conditions, there could be immediate health benefits to go along with the emotional well-being from reduced stress.