Scary picture has little effect on violent video fans.
A new entry in the perennial debate about video violence uses brain waves to argue that violent video games "desensitize" players, making them more aggression-prone.
Researchers led by psychologist Bruce D. Bartholow of the University of Missouri, Columbia, asked 34 male college students about their exposure to violent video games. The researchers then wired up the men to see how their brains reacted to different types of pictures. They found that the violent game afficionados showed a diminished P300 brain wave--a wave that responds to stimuli the brain registers as significant--in response to violent pictures compared with the other game players. And the smaller P300 correlated with higher levels of aggression in a test allowing subjects to punish an unseen "opponent" with a blast of noise. "To our knowledge, this is the first study to link violent video game exposure to a brain process associated with desensitization to violence and to link that brain response to aggressive behavior," says Bartholow.
The study, in press at the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, still fails to show that video games cause violent behavior, says psychologist Jonathan Freedman of the University of Toronto in Canada. Although games can "habituate" the brain to violent images, Freedman says "there is no good evidence that exposure to lots of [video] violence desensitizes you to real violence."
CREDITS: BRADLEY LANG AND B. N. CUTHBERT, INTERNATIONAL AFFECTIVE PICTURE SYSTEM (IAPS): INSTRUCTION MANUAL AND AFFECTIVE RATINGS (UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, 2001)
