Assistant Professor at @MorganStateU - Psychology of Esports, Gender, Skill - 🏳️🌈 & 🇵🇷🇲🇽🇺🇸 - They/them
Joined July 2016
- Tweets 555
- Following 430
- Followers 371
- Likes 2,912
21 Photos and videos
Jun 13
Research Recruiting: Seeking college student esports players age 18-35 to participate in 2 surveys. Fill out surveys now and in ~12 weeks for $5 each. Participants may be invited to a 6-hour mindfulness training program over Zoom for an additional $153. morgansbm.qualtrics.com/jfe/…
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Kyle Nolla, PhD retweeted
7 Oct 2025
At the 2025 #BigTenCRCSummit, @KyleNolla, PhD, presented updates on the Jessen Award–funded study AthenaCompanion, a gamified web-based application designed to improve cancer symptom monitoring.
Learn more about this study and the Jessen Award: bigtencrc.org/big-ten-crc-in…
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Kyle Nolla, PhD retweeted
6 Aug 2025
_*~RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY~*_
Attending Supernova this week? Stop by the research table in the tournament room to participate in paid research on gaming!
We’re offering a variety of studies for everyone - some are limited to tournament entrants & Top 100 players.
@SuperSmashCon
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Kyle Nolla, PhD retweeted
Join our faculty! I could not imagine a more supportive environment than @NUFeinbergMSS @MSSatNU and encourage anyone with a health equity focus to consider applying.
10 Dec 2024
Come join our incredible community @NUFeinbergMSS! We seek candidates for an open-rank tenure-eligible position. We are particularly interested in investigators with a cutting-edge research portfolio focused on health equity research. Learn more here facultyrecruiting.northweste…
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Kyle Nolla, PhD retweeted
7 Nov 2024
Hey everyone! At @G2esports and European partners, we seek esports players 18 (any game, ranked, or team). Take 10 minutes to share your insights on mental health in esports. It’s anonymous, and your feedback will help create better support for players like you.
Let’s make our community stronger together! 💪
👉 vub.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe2/…
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5 Nov 2024
Big thanks to the TOs of @SuperSmashCon @TheBigHouseSSB and @SmashNSplash who allowed me to table at their events to collect data. And thank you to the 90 players who took time out of their tournaments to fill out my surveys!
5 Nov 2024
Wanted to make a thread to highlight cool aspects of this study. Namely, data came from Smashers competing in national tourneys rather than a controlled lab environment. We had to think hard about how real-world conditions would impact mood, then control. 4 specific highlights:
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5 Nov 2024
playing games you know you’ll win/lose! All seem obvious but again, cool to have some numbers we can put on it to describe real-world experiences.
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5 Nov 2024
Takeaways: Competing in tournaments involve a range of emotions emerging from complex info players are considering. In the real world, players seem more likely to be too nervous than too calm, so equipping players with strategies to manage over-arousal could improve performance.
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5 Nov 2024
We found that spillover/fatigue has a real impact on results: when someone has had a tough loser’s bracket run, that exhaustion *does* harm their ability to perform well in their toughest matches. Seems obvious, but cool to have scientific data to back it up.
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5 Nov 2024
4) Finally, players may feel validated in their emotional experiences during tournaments when looking closely at Table 1. Yes, people feel pretty shitty after losses - yes, people get exhausted over the course of the weekend. Yes, playing close games can be less satisfying than
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5 Nov 2024
We didn’t see an effect of a scary future opponent - perhaps bc brackets aren’t always updated immediately during Smash tournaments, so players aren’t always sure who they’d face next, except between competition days like when R1 pools are all done & R2 pools are about to start.
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5 Nov 2024
Wanted to make a thread to highlight cool aspects of this study. Namely, data came from Smashers competing in national tourneys rather than a controlled lab environment. We had to think hard about how real-world conditions would impact mood, then control. 4 specific highlights:
| #ESPORTS #FREEACCESS #RESEARCH | Congrats to @KyleNolla Paul Reber & Mark Beeman on the publication of "Affect and Performance across Double-Elimination Tournaments: A Field Study of Super Smash Bros Competitors" in JEGE's SI on #Psychology in Esports
doi.org/10.1123/jege.2024-00…
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5 Nov 2024
3) Elimination tournament effects. In actual tourneys, players are thinking ahead: who am I gonna play if I win, if I lose, what does my bracket look like? We accounted for 2 effects: a spillover effect (P1 has played more games than P2) & a shadow effect (scary future opponent).
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5 Nov 2024
2) Relative strength of P1 & P2. We know top players sail through pools on skill alone, so obv their mood (& impact of their mood) will differ from an 0-2 player who only gets a few chances to play/win. So, we controlled for seed of P1 & P2 (& how close their seeds were).
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5 Nov 2024
We explored a few reasons why this might be, and it seems that experiences of performance pressure are related to arousal, but we’re not entirely sure of the direction (feeling arousal➡️ppl think they’re under pressure? Or feeling pressure➡️arousal?). Will look more in future.
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5 Nov 2024
high arousal would harm game performance bc all of our players would be activated/invested. This is the main finding of the paper: after controlling for other things described in this thread, we found a difference in players’ self-rated moods before sets that were won or lost.
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5 Nov 2024
1) Physiological activation, or “arousal”, can help or harm performance based on how difficult the task is. But in the real world, does anyone sit down to a tournament match & feel no nerves? Or boredom? Although science may say arousal that is too low/high is bad, we assumed
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Kyle Nolla, PhD retweeted
| #ESPORTS #FREEACCESS #RESEARCH | Congrats to @KyleNolla Paul Reber & Mark Beeman on the publication of "Affect and Performance across Double-Elimination Tournaments: A Field Study of Super Smash Bros Competitors" in JEGE's SI on #Psychology in Esports
doi.org/10.1123/jege.2024-00…
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Kyle Nolla, PhD retweeted
31 Oct 2024
A few more weeks to apply! 😊
My lab uses mixed-methods approaches to examine factors that shape the mental health trajectories of Black youth & adults, with a focus on identifying protective factors to reduce suicide vulnerability and racial trauma
psychology.berkeley.edu/stud…
21 Aug 2024
I am thrilled to share that this year, I am reviewing applications for the Clinical Psychology PhD program at @BerkeleyPsych!
I will also be hiring a lab manager --lab website with more info coming soon! Please help spread the word!
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Kyle Nolla, PhD retweeted
| #FORTHCOMING #ESPORTS #RESEARCH | Congrats to @KyleNolla Paul Reber & Mark Beeman on acceptance of "Affect and Performance across Double-Elimination Tournaments: A Field Study of Super Smash Bros Competitors" in JEGE's Special Issue on #Psychology in Esports
@benjamintsharpe
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