Feb 24, 2011 13:31 GMT  ·  By

A new study says that those gamers who are attracted to violent video-game experiences are not desensitized in the long term by overexposure and that they are as likely to be impressed by violence that they witness in the real world.

The study is published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology and has looked at a sample of 122 undergraduate students, with 45 of them having played violent video games during the previous six months.

Those who ran the study have showed all the participants a set of 150 images, with disturbing and violent slides mixed among them, and after one hour they asked the subjects to identify those images who impressed them from among a larger set.

The idea was that those who were exposed to violent video games should be less impressed by the images so they should have a much harder time in identifying them, registering longer times that the non-gamers included among the subjects.

The actual experiment showed no difference between the two groups, and gamers and non-gamers have reported a similar level of intensity in the feelings they registered as a response to the images.

Researchers Holly Bowen and Julia Spaniol say that the results are encouraging for those who state violent video games cause no actual psychological harm in the long term, with the researchers saying it is “another piece of the puzzle video games aren't having long-term effects on cognition and memory.”

The researchers have also admitted that the study was fairly small and that more research into the subject was needed in order to draw a definitive conclusion on the desensitization effects of violent video games.

Violent video games have long seen as a threat to the fabric of society and to the feeble minds of young gamers, but recently information that has shown that their impact is minimal has been popping up.