When I first met Berni Good, she was introduced as a cyberpsychologist. I admit to thinking a cyberpsychologist was something that a game developer had invented for their Gibsonesque cyberpunk game, where synthetic humans plug in at jack-in points and have their circuits probed for social relay malfunctions.

In my head, a cyberpsychologist was like a maternal mainframe entity, an electronic pitstop for android jumpstarts. Berni Good (BSc Psych; MBPsS) is not an electronic pitstop for android jumpstarts. There is nothing Uncanny Valley about her intelligence and candour for creative output.

Cyberpsychology exists: The British Psychological Society has a whole section of its website and studies dedicated to it. According to John Suler's 1996 book The Psychology of Cyberspace, of course available online in its entirety, cyberpsychology can help to understand "how people react to and behave within cyberspace".

The proliferation and subsequent ubiquity of the internet throughout our lives has undeniably had a huge impact on the human condition, but it's not only this that cyberpsychology formally investigates. Good is studying the impact of video games on the human psyche.

"Cyberpsychology is all about how human beings interact with technology, and the psychology of human behaviour when it comes to interacting with technology," Good says. "I did an undergraduate degree, a degree that was accredited by the British Psychological Society … and I had a yearning to get back into the video-game industry, because I missed it so much – I'm a hardcore gamer, I love my gaming, it's what I do with my free time."

Good previously headed up the website Games Domain in the dotcom bubble, and so in terms of the games industry, she's a veteran. "I was trying to figure out a way of combining aspects of human behaviour and video gaming in terms of what can I do for a living, instead of sitting and counselling people through various issues they might have from a psychological perspective …"

Good found the only masters level course available in the world in cyberpsychology, which is in Dún Laoghaire in Ireland, just south of Dublin. She praises the course for its expertise. "It's one thing understanding psychology and understanding video-game play, but combining them both is really quite a big jump, and there's only a few people that do this in the world."

Good's research has recently concentrated on developing a video game designed to help with mental-health issues. "I've been working with self-determination theory," she says, referring to the psychological theory of motivation developed with regard to human intrinsic needs. Much expanded on by researchers Edward L Deci and Richard M Ryan, self-determination theory suggests competence, autonomy, and psychological relatedness are the three needs that stimulate the psychological health and wellbeing of a person.

"Video games can sometimes make people really happy," Good continues. "I've grown up around video-game players, skateboarders, graffiti artists – people who take their leisure time quite seriously. I've seen over the years how video games have helped people. I see video games as a soft place to fall when the going gets a bit tough.

"When I play a video game – if it's a good video game and I'm immersed in it – I feel a sense of wellbeing and happiness. Why not take those mechanics and use those gaming mechanics to address people who have mental-health issues?

"Now I'm not talking on a very deep level here, because people will still need clinical help – people who have really serious mental-health issues. But certainly people like self-help books, and so the idea I had is to develop something along that kind of line. Something that can go a bit mainstream, but is something that will help you deal with everyday stresses – depression for example.

"Young people have lots of pressure on them these days to reach certain expectation levels, and what's been great doing the cyberpsychology masters is that it has enabled me to access academic research that's really robust; that's taken some of these ideas around in terms of what video games can do, in terms of helping to treat people who have some mental-health issues – anxiety and that type of thing."

And has the games industry – or even academia – embraced Good's idea of combining video games and psychological research? "Two years ago, when I first started doing my masters, one of the reasons I started to do the masters was because I had this idea of how can we take the really good stuff that gaming can do for people and take it to an applied perspective. People were just looking at me like I was a bit crazy. I think it's loosened up a bit over the last 12 months. And quite why that is I don't know, and I'd love to understand why, but I think, generally, that there's been a dilution across obvious platforms and different genres and stuff like that within the games industry anyway, and so maybe people are being a bit more open,.

"Really smart developers could be including some of the stuff that triggers wellbeing and happiness within their games, that address light levels of people feeling a bit stressed, a bit anxious. And if they were really smart, they'd start including that in their games."

"When I think about self-determination theory, Halo is a great example," Good smiles. "I know, it's a big title and all the rest of it, but it's a really good example, particularly the last Halo that came out. In terms of competence, you can defeat your enemies quite well in Halo. You can keep getting back up on the horse and defeating as you move along.

"In terms of autonomy, there are lots of different maps and lots of different areas in Halo that you can choose to go. There are different weapons that you can choose and you can decide where you want to go and what you want to do, so it does address those issues. And in terms of relatedness – Master Chief. I mean, at Eurogamer last year there was a Master Chief dressed up … I was pushing 14-year-old people out of the way so I could get my photograph taken with him," she laughs.

Good gave a talk at the Develop conference in Brighton called Gamer Perception of Psychopathy in Characters, which was a review of the research Dr Angela Tinwell, senior lecturer in games and creative technologies at the University of Bolton, did on the 'Uncanny Valley' phenomenon in realistic, human-like characters from animation and video games.

Tinwell's research suggests that human beings feel alienated from people who do not emote in the top half of their face, which correlates with how much video game players relate to the facial animation in game characters. The research also suggests that the reason this might happen is that people who display psychopathic behaviour often are expressionless in the top half of their face, which sets off warning signals in people around them. In the same manner, if game developers were to deliberately not animate the facial expression in a character, it might transmit a significant feeling of alienation and fear to a player about a character, which could be used in horror games, for example.

Good also said research suggested that people were more empathetic towards women characters than men. There has been a lot of emphasis on women characters in games, particularly recently, as they often appear as the emotional touchstone of games like The Last of Us, being more emotional, and crying more, responding emotionally to events around them.

What has also happened is that a lot of psychological research has been done into female psychopaths' expressions, as there is often more media coverage of their trials, which gives researchers more material to study. This research has shown that though female psychopaths might cry in court, often their faces are expressionless, which unsettles people in response.

I ask Good if there is a reason game developers are focusing more on women characters' emotional impact on the player. "Going back to what I was saying in my talk," Good explains. "For every 20 male psychopaths, there's one female psychopath, but that female psychopath can drop a lot of really hardcore bombs … I think that because of the nurturing, empathetic aspects to females in general, that they're probably trying to play on it a little bit … let's hope that they [game developers] are getting their visual, facial expressions right in those characters, because if not, they might just be turning people off.

"If you think about the female psychopaths and some of the stuff that you can see, from media in murder trials and stuff, you can see a lot of them crying. But if you look at it from a psychological perspective, they're fake tears really. Now, if people are reading that in characters – that it doesn't seem authentic or not appropriate, in terms of the emotional response – that would just turn people off I would think."

Is there a danger that people are not going to find Tinwell's research and will carry on down the Uncanny Valley? Good replies that she thinks The Last of Us has done something right. "Whatever approach they've used to make the graphical and behavioural fidelity of that character realistic, you can guarantee someone's going to be copying that," she says.

But how can the games industry embrace more academic research? How can we use this research and have psychologists communicate more with game makers? "You have to be able to critically evaluate the validity of those research papers," Good suggests of developer-academic relations. "And that's why academic research goes out to peer review, so that it can be pulled about by colleagues – other scientists and social researchers can go: 'That doesn't make any sense'. Validity and reliability is: can that piece of research be replicated and will it show similar results continuously? And game developers and publishers and people in the industry – will they be able to be able to pick it apart and pull it apart? I don't know, I doubt it very much."

"I would love to see people like myself get over to game developers and publishers the results of this research; and present them research that's going to work," she says.

More about Berni Good and her research can be found here.

• This article was amended on 2 September 2013 to clarify references to the work of Dr Angela Tinwell: Tinwell, A, Abdel Nabi, D & Charlton, J (2013) Perception of Psychopathy and the Uncanny Valley in Virtual Characters, Computers in Human Behavior, vol 29, no 4, pp 1617-1625.