- Introduction
According to Bushman and Hussmann (2000), exposing children of very young ages to television results in them turning into aggressive adults. Violence in the movies can cause increased levels of aggression in children leading to a condition called trait aggressiveness, which manifests in the long term.
Violent video games are becoming to be considered as components of antisocial media-based socialization. This is a fairly new entertainment media. However, it has begun to impact kids so much that it has also led to shooting in schools.
This paper shall focus on the impacts of violent video games on the aggressive behaviors of young girls. Normally, the research pertaining to this field is limited as young girls are considered not affected by the violence in the games. It is also a fact that girls and young women spend relatively lesser time on violent video games than what boys do. These two facts are the reasons that the topic has not been researched thoroughly so far.
In all video games, the player must identify himself with the main character to proceed in the game. The effects of controlling the character of the same sex is studied in this paper and the extent that this match contributes to increase in aggression is a point of interest. Thus, one potential moderating variable of violent video game effects, i.e., gender of the character being controlled, was studied. The experiment was framed so that two more variables were considered. They are the mediating variables - revenge motivation (aggression motivation that is hostile) and aggressive motivation that is instrumental.
2. Participants
Ninety-one females who were undergraduates enrolled for the program as participants. Of them, 33 were given violent games with a female protagonist to play with, 30 were given violent video games with a male protagonist to play with, and 27 participants were assigned to play nonviolent games. The data pertaining to one participant was ignored as the values on key mediating variables were missing.
- Materials
There were two video games that the participants played with. They are the Street Fighter II and Oh No! More Lemmings. In Street Fighter II, the main screen character can be a male or female. The main character is controlled by the player in this third-person fighting game. The character engages in a number of fights with other 424 Anderson and Murphy characters.
Lemmings is a game meant for children and the aim lies in helping lemmings reach safety by either making holes in the walls, building steps, or by more such activities. Lemmings was a game played on the Macintosh Computer.
These two games are very easy to learn. They do not require much practicing to master how to play them. Following playing the games, the participants performed a competitive reaction time task.
4. Competitive Reaction Time Task
Aggressive behavior was measured by the altered form of the Taylor Competitive Reaction Time (TCRT). The TCRT has been used for long to measure aggressive behavior (Anderson et al.). According to the TCRT assessment, participants compete with a factious person. Who responds first to a presentation of a tone is observed; the person who does not respond first is termed the loser and he receives a loud noise or aversive stimulus. The stimulus and the intensity are decided upon by the opponent.
There is no opponent really present here. The number of wins and losses are predetermined and so is the intensity of the aversive stimulus received by the participants. How intense the averse stimulus is set for the opponent by the participant determines the aggressive nature of the participant.
In this study that we conducted, a two-phase task version was utilized. This two-phase version of the task has been implemented successfully in a number of experiments measuring the aggressive behavior of participants involved. The Retaliation Competitive Reaction Time task (RCRT) has Phase I where 25 trials are present. Here, the ‘‘opponent’’ decides on the intensity of aversive noise which the participant receives on ‘‘lose’’ trials. Settings vary from 1 (55 decibels) to 10 (105db).
There is also available a “zero” no noise choice. When the participant loses in the trial, he or she receives noise blast of this intensity. During Phase I trial, the participant does not set the noise intensity for the opponent. Phase II trials are similar to Phase II. Only the roles are reversed in Phase II. In phase I group of trials, all the participants involved received the same set of 13 wins and 12 losses. Three blocks of eight constituted the remaining 24 trials. Of these, the participants won and lost half in each block. The supposed opponent gave an increase provocation setting for the noise patterns delivered to the participant. In Block I, the settings were in range from 2-4, in block II it was in the range from 4-7 and in block III it was in the range from 7-9.
5. Questionnaire
A Questionnaire modeled by Barthlow and Anderson was circulated amongst participants and they answered the set of questions based on the experiments. Six items asked participants to ‘‘indicate the extent to which this motive describes your motive when deciding on where to set the noise levels.’’ Responses were observed on a 5–point scale that was unipolar. It was anchored at 1 “(not at all)”, 2 “(a little bit)”, 3 “(somewhat)”, 4 “(quite a lot)” and 5 “(a lot)”. The 6 items on the questionnaire were:
“(A) I wanted to impair my opponent’s performance in order to win more”;
“(b) I wanted to control my opponent’s level of responses;”
“(c) I wanted to make my opponent mad;”
“(d) I wanted to hurt my opponent;”
“(e) I wanted to pay back my opponent for the noise levels he/she set;” and
“(f) I wanted to blast him/her harder than he/she blasted me”
6. Results and Discussion
6.1 Correlations
Instrumental motivation and self-reported revenge motivation correlated positively (r0. 31, Po .001). Both instrumental motivation and revenge correlated positively with the times the high-intensity noise blasts were delivered to their opponent (rrevenge = .50, n = 90, P.001; rinstrumental = .26, n = 90, P.05). The revenge correlation was found to be larger than the instrumental correlation significantly, t(87) =2.22, P.05.
6.2 Aggressive Motivation as a Mediator of Aggression
Each of the motivation measures was considered as covariates while again running the Street Fighter vs. Lemmings analysis that measured aggressive behavior. This was performed so that it could be ascertained whether the instrumental or revenge aggressive motivation was responsible for the aggressive behavior in violent video games. There exists only a small correlation between aggression and revenge motivation. This indicates that is the most probable mediation candidate.
6.3 Instrumental Aggressive Motivation
Violent game effect size on aggression was not impacted to a great extent when instrumental motivation was considered a covariate. The Street Fighter vs. Lemmings contrast was at F (1, 86) =4.58, P.05 and remained significant.
6.4 Revenge Motivation
Violent game effect size on aggression was impacted to a marginal extent when revenge motivation was considered as a covariate, F (1, 86) =3.89, P.06. The unique variance in aggression pertaining to revenge motivation was at, F (1, 86) = 24.44, P.001 and highly significant. This is indicative for the fact that the increases in revenge motivation partially mediated the violent video game effect on aggression.
Full text: VOA English Service DATELINE: Chapel Hill, North Carolina The video game industry is a multi-billion dollar, worldwide enterprise that targets many of its products at teenage players. Research has hinted in the past that children who play violent computer games might experience behavioral changes. Now researchers in Indianapolis, Indiana, say exposure to violent games affects blood flow in parts of the brain that control emotions even after the game is over. Vincent Mathews is a professor of radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He took 44 adolescents and divided them into two groups. One group played a violent video game and the other group played another exciting video game that lacked violence.
7. Analysis of a Recent Study
A research conducted at Indianapolis, Indiana suggested after trials the flow of blood to the parts of the brain controlling emotions was altered in children who played violent video games. Vincent Mathews who worked as professor of radiology at the Indiana School of Medicine performed the experiment by dividing 44 adolescent children into two groups. While one group was given a violent video game to play, the other group played an exciting video game that had no violence in it. An MRI imaging machine later measured the changes in the adolescent’s brains. What was revealed was that there was decreased activity in the part of the brain of children who played violent video games, which is involved in behavioral monitoring and behavioral control. Mathew says, "That part of the brain," adds Vincent Matthews, "is getting us ready for 'fight or flight' response, engaging in a conflict or fleeing from a conflict." Thus, it was concluded that children playing violent video game definitely had an emotional impact on them (Voice of America News).
Works Cited
Anderson CA, Lindsay JJ, Bushman BJ. “Research in the Psychological Laboratory: Truth or Triviality?” Current Directions in Psychological Science 8 (1999): 3–9.
Bartholow BD Anderson CA. “Examining the Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior: Potential Sex Differences”. J Exp Soc Psychol 38 (2002): 283–290.
Bushman BJ, Huesmann LR. 2000. “Effects of Televised Violence On Aggression. In: Singer D, Singer J, editors. Handbook of children and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. (2000), p 223–254.
Voice of America News/FIND, Children Who Play Violent Computer Games Might Experience Behavioral Changes, Wiley InterScience, 2001.
