Children who play violent video games are very likely to become desensitized to real-life violent events and this could lead to troubling emotional disorders

Aug 10, 2006 13:12 GMT  ·  By

A new research in the field of video games investigated how violent video games affect the emotional behavior of children and their response to real world events. The research showed that due to too much exposure to violence in video games, children tend to become numb and insensitive to outside, real-life violent acts. Scientists at Iowa State University in Ames warned that it is not important the time a child spends playing such violent games (shooters, for instance). 20 minutes spent daily by a teenager playing this kind of games should be enough to make him indifferent to outside world violent events.

"It appears that individuals who play violent video games habituate, or 'get used to,' all the violence and eventually become physiologically numb to it. The modern entertainment media landscape could accurately be described as an effective systematic violence-desensitization tool," wrote study leader Nicholas Carnagey and colleagues in their report published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The team investigated physical responses of 257 college students, 124 men and 133 women. Subjects were asked to play both violent and non-violent video games, while researchers tested participants' heart rates and galvanic skin responses before they started playing and after the game session was over. Each playing session lasted for 20 minutes.

Subjects asked to play violent games tried their skills at Carmageddon, Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat, and Future Cop. Non-violent video-games included Glider Pro, 3D Pinball, 3D Munch Man, and Tetra Madness. After the 20 minutes' playing session ended, researchers found that both volunteers in the violent and non-violent games groups showed similar results when having their heart rate and galvanic skin response tested.

But there was another stage of the study, in which subjects that had previously played video games were asked to watch a 10 minutes videotape of real-life violence, including courtroom outbursts, police confrontations, fights among prisoners, people shooting at each other etc. The same two physical responses of the participants - their heart rate and galvanic skin responses - were screened by researchers during their watching the videotape. Results showed that youngsters who had played violent video games had weaker physiological responses to the violent real-life events than those who had tried their luck at non-violent games.

"The only time we saw physiologic differences among participants was while they were watching real-life violence," noted the researchers. Their findings "demonstrate that violent video game exposure can cause desensitization to real-life violence. Children receive high doses of media violence. It initially is packaged in ways that are not too threatening, with cute cartoon-like characters." However, "older children consume increasingly threatening and realistic violence, but the increases are gradual and always in a way that is fun."

Nicholas Carnagey and colleagues involved in the study warn: "In real life, were not talking about a simple 20-minute exposure, were talking about exposure that's hours on end, day after day. Parents should be aware and active in their child's exposure to media. They should really think about what messages they're exposing their children to."