![]() ![]() His work has found that children who are already at risk may be more likely to choose to play violent video games. He also claims that much of the research into video game violence has failed to control for other variables such as mental health and family life, which may have impacted the results. While his own 2009 meta-analytic review reported results similar to Anderson’s, Ferguson contends that laboratory results have not translated into real world, meaningful effects. ![]() Ferguson, have challenged the position that video game violence harms children. Other researchers, including psychologist Christopher J. “One major conclusion from this and other research on violent entertainment media is that content matters,” says Anderson. Anderson and others concluded that “the evidence strongly suggests that exposure to violent video games is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, and aggressive affect and for decreased empathy and prosocial behavior.” Anderson’s earlier research showed that playing violent video games can increase a person’s aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior both in laboratory settings and in daily life. Still, several meta-analytic reviews have reported negative effects of exposure to violence in video games.Ī 2010 review by psychologist Craig A. Many of the most popular video games, such as “Call of Duty” and “Grand Theft Auto,” are violent however, as video game technology is relatively new, there are fewer empirical studies of video game violence than other forms of media violence. A Pew Research Center survey in 2008 found that half of all teens reported playing a video game “yesterday,” and those who played every day typically did so for an hour or more. 97% of adolescents age 12–17 play video games-on a computer, on consoles such as the Wii, Playstation, and Xbox, or on portable devices such as Gameboys, smartphones, and tablets. The advent of video games raised new questions about the potential impact of media violence, since the video game player is an active participant rather than merely a viewer. Other research has found that exposure to media violence can desensitize people to violence in the real world and that, for some people, watching violence in the media becomes enjoyable and does not result in the anxious arousal that would be expected from seeing such imagery. However, later research by psychologists Douglas Gentile and Brad Bushman, among others, suggested that exposure to media violence is just one of several factors that can contribute to aggressive behavior. Interestingly, being aggressive as a child did not predict watching more violent TV as a teenager, suggesting that TV watching could be a cause rather than a consequence of aggressive behavior. By observing these participants into adulthood, Huesmann and Eron found that the ones who’d watched a lot of TV violence when they were 8 years old were more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for criminal acts as adults. ![]() Rowell Huesmann, Leonard Eron, and others starting in the 1980s found that children who watched many hours of violence on television when they were in elementary school tended to show higher levels of aggressive behavior when they became teenagers. Children may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others.Children may be more fearful of the world around them.Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others.The resulting report and a follow-up report in 1982 by the National Institute of Mental Health identified these major effects of seeing violence on television: Of special concern has been the portrayal of violence, particularly given psychologist Albert Bandura’s work in the 1970s on social learning and the tendency of children to imitate what they see.Īs a result of 15 years of “consistently disturbing” findings about the violent content of children’s programs, the Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior was formed in 1969 to assess the impact of violence on the attitudes, values, and behavior of viewers. Virtually since the dawn of television, parents, teachers, legislators, and mental health professionals have wanted to understand the impact of television programs, particularly on children. ![]()
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