Violent video games players become agressive: Study

A study has found that the brains of violent video game players become less responsive to violence, and that it in turn increases aggression.

The University of Missouri (MU) study helped explain why players of violent video games become more aggressive. 

Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology at MU, found that violent video games increase aggression by monitoring participant brain activity.

"Many researchers have believed that becoming desensitised to violence leads to increased human aggression. Until our study, however, this causal association had never been demonstrated experimentally," Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science, said.

During the study, 70 young adult participants were randomly assigned to play either a non-violent or a violent video game for 25 minutes.

Immediately afterwards, the researchers measured brain responses as participants viewed a series of neutral photos, such as a man on a bike, and violent photos, such as a man holding a gun in another man's mouth. 

Finally, participants competed against an opponent in a task that allowed them to give their opponent a controllable blast of loud noise. The level of noise blast the participants set for their opponent was the measure of aggression.

The researchers found that participants who played one of several popular violent games, such as "Call of Duty," "Hitman," "Killzone" and "Grand Theft Auto," set louder noise blasts for their opponents during the competitive task - that is, they were more aggressive - than participants who played a non-violent game.

In addition, for participants that had not played many violent video games before completing the study, playing a violent game in the lab caused a reduced brain response to the photos of violence - an indicator of desensitisation.

Moreover, this reduced brain response predicted participants' aggression levels: the smaller the brain response to violent photos, the more aggressive participants were. 

"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 said.

"It could be that those individuals are already so desensitised to violence from habitually playing violent video games that an additional exposure in the lab has very little effect on their brain responses.

"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," he stated.

The article, 'This Is Your Brain on Violent Video Games: Neural Desensitization to Violence Predicts Increased Aggression Following Violent Video Game Exposure', will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.