14 DAY TRIAL // While an important debate about the positive and negative aspects of violent video games still rages on in an American Court, experts have just released a new study, explaining why children and teens who play video games tend to exhibit an increase in aggression levels.
This research – carried out by investigators at the university of Missouri (MU) – reveals that playing violent games leads to a decreased response of the brain when exposed to violence. This, in turn, is a strong predictor for aggression.
Researchers analyzed more than 70 young adult participants in a series of experiments. All the test subjects were made to play video games for about 25 minutes, but only half of them played violent games. The other half were given neutral games.
As soon as play time was over, the test subjects were made to view of series of neutral and aggressive photos, while the research team was measuring their neural response to these new stimuli.
After this stage of the experiments was done, participants were paired up, and made to play a game in which every person could give his or her colleague a blast of loud noise to the ears. The volume of the blast could be controlled by the participants.
Experts say that the volume subjects decided to give the noise constituted the measure of aggression they tracked. During the competitive task, those who played violent video games tended to blast their opponents with louder blasts, Science Blog reports.
“Many researchers have believed that becoming desensitized to violence leads to increased human aggression. Until our study, however, this causal association had never been demonstrated experimentally,” explains Bruce Bartholow.
The expert, who holds an appointment as an associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science, says that participants in the violent game group played popular titles such as Call of Duty, Hitman, Killzone and Grand Theft Auto.
“The fact that video game exposure did not affect the brain activity of participants who already had been highly exposed to violent games is interesting and suggests a number of possibilities,” Bartholow goes on to explain.
“It could be that those individuals are already so desensitized to violence from habitually playing violent video games that an additional exposure in the lab has very little effect on their brain responses,” he adds.
“There also could be an unmeasured factor that causes both a preference for violent video games and a smaller brain response to violence. In either case, there are additional measures to consider,” the expert concludes.