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Are you constantly overcome with worry, perhaps about what to do if your children or parents got sick, how to pay your bills, or whether that mole on your hand is the first sign of a medical scare? Does the thought of going to a party and meeting people you don’t know fill you with dread? Are you terrified of speaking in public? There might soon be an app for that. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Harvard University are exploring the use of gamelike programs on smartphones to treat anxiety. The recently completed study, by graduate student Phil Enock, Psychology Professor Richard McNally, and their Boston University colleague, Professor Stefan Hofmann, found that playing a simple game — pressing buttons after viewing images of faces — for a few minutes a day over a month reduced anxiety for hundreds of study participants. While the study demonstrated that cognitive bias modification, a form...