How Violent Games Affect Human Behavior

A Study has found video games have no long-term effects on a persons empathy,suggesting it is not lessened by long term gaming.

Previous studies have controversially pointed at a link between gaming and a lack of Empathy, but they often only examine the short-term effects.this latest study , published in the journal Frontier in Psychology and led by Dr Gregor Szycik from the Hannover Medical School in Germany instead looked at the longer term effects and found no correlation.

"We interpreted our result as evidence against the desensitization hypothesis and suggest that the impact of violent media on emotional processing may be rather acute and shot-lived" the researchers wrote in there paper.

The Study involved group of 30 people , 15 who played violent games regularly (four hours a day on average), and 15 control subjects who had not played violent video game. the games include things like Call of duty , Counter Strike , GTA's , and etc. 

to make sure there were no short-term effects , the "Gamers" were asked not to play games for three hours priors to the experiment.Then , both groups were asked psychological question , before being scanned in an MRI scanner whie they play were playing shown images designed to provoke an emotional and emphatic response. this was used to see which brain region were activated.


in the psychological questionnaire, there was no difference in measures of aggression and empathy between the gamers and non-gamers. the researchers found the same finding in the FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) data.

"These result surprised the researchers, as they were contray to their initial hypothesis, and suggest that any negative effects of violent video games on perception or behavior may be short-lived" ,
a statement read.

in their paper,the researchers note that other studies looking at these effects had used participants who were exposed to violent video games or other experiments before or during the experiments. this meant those result could have been "influenced not only by desensitization but also by other factors such as increased attention towards motor actions or immediate activation of aggressive cognitions."


There were some limitation of the study noted by the researchers , such as the small sample size and the difficulty of analyzing "null finding" like this. also , both groups were not controled for the other media, such as violent movies or internet content, meaning there are is a possibility they had experience desensitization through other means.

Nonetheless, the finding are Interesting when discussing violent video games. the effect on empathy is highly controversials, so there no doubts this latest study will stroke the fire somewhat more.