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Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents
DISCUSSION
The main goal of the current study was to test if short-term exposure to prosocial video games can in- crease helpful and decrease hurtful behaviors in chil- dren compared to neutral and violent games. Results revealed that video games with prosocial content in- creased helpful and decreased hurtful behaviors in a short-term experimental context with children. In contrast, children’s games with violent content in- creased hurtful and decreased helpful behavior. This study adds to the existing literature in several ways: (1) it is the first to test experimental prosocial video game effects on children; (2) it provides additional validity tests of the Tangram procedure for assessing aspects of helpful and hurtful behavior; (3) it is one of a handful of experimental studies that have used vio- lent children’s video games rather than more graphic and realistic violent games.
Sestir and Bartholow (2010) recently demonstrated that some nonviolent games can decrease aggression, despite having no prosocial content. Whether a given game or game-type appears to increase or decrease aggression or prosocial behavior depends, of course, on the conditions with which it is being compared. No-game comparison conditions have been problem- atic in this domain, because they differ in so many ways from the key violent or prosocial game condi- tions. Among other things, they tend to be boring or even frustrating to participants, especially to those who expected to be playing a video game or who
believe that other participants are playing. There- fore, most video game experiments have all partici- pants play some type of game, and the best ones as- sess potential confounding variables (such as fun and frustration) and control for them statistically when necessary. In the present experiment, even after sev- eral theoretically relevant factors were accounted for, results revealed that prosocial game content increased helpful and decreased hurtful behavior relative to both violent and neutral games.
The idea of prosocial games increasing helpful be- haviors in children in the short term is encouraging. Of course, more significant is the potential for these short-term effects to produce long-term changes. In- deed, social-cognitve learning theories suggests that the processes that produce such short-term effects can, with repeated exposure, lead to long-term in- creases in the accessibility and use of prosocial knowledge structures (including behavioral scripts), as demonstrated in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies [Gentile et al., 2009]. Although results from the present study are encouraging in finding be- havioral effects of prosocial games, it is important to study the underlying mechanisms responsible for these behavioral effects.
Previous studies on proso- cial video game effects suggest that these behavioral effects might be due to changes in cognition [e.g., Gen- tile et al., 2009; Greitemeyer and Osswald, 2010, 2011] as well as affect [Greitemeyer and Osswald, 2010; Saleem et al., 2012]. Note that the studies testing the effects of prosocial games on affect have used an adult sample. Future research should explore this link us- ing a sample of children. It would be ideal to test the effects of prosocial video game content on prosocial and antisocial cognitions, affect, and behaviors within the same study in order to do meditational analyses exploring the underlying mechanisms responsible for prosocial effects on prosocial behaviors.
Similar to the behavioral study by Gentile et al. (2009), the present study assessed helpful and hurt- ful behaviors using a single help/hurt tangram mea- sure. This method has an important advantage in that helpful and hurtful behaviors can be assessed simulta- neously. Although helpful and hurtful behaviors are conceptually distinct, they often are inversely related especially in the short-term real world contexts. For example, when people engage in a hurtful behavior toward a target person, they seldom simultaneously engage in helpful behavior toward that same target. By allowing participants the option to help, be neu- tral, or hurt another individual, this tangram measure has the potential to assess a range of interpersonal be- haviors related to conflict.
Aggr. Behav.
286 Saleem et al.
However, an important limitation of this design is that individuals who score high on helpfulness by se- lecting a greater number of easy puzzles will tend to score low on hurtfulness, and vice versa. Indeed, even after using our “greater than one” scoring proce- dure, the correlation between the helpful and hurtful scores remained at r = −.51. Thus, there is an is- sue of nonindependence in the way hurtfulness and helpfulness is assessed using the tangram measure. In previous studies [Gentile et al., 2009] and in the current study, this concern has been addressed in at least three ways: (1) ignoring the medium cate- gory for the analyses, thus reducing interdependence; (2) using the number of easy and difficult puzzles greater than one instead of raw scores so partici- pants can obtain a score of 0 on both helpfulness and hurtfulness; and (3) entering both helpful and hurtful scores as a within-subject factor. An alterna- tive scoring procedure is to derive one overall score by assigning equidistant weights to hard, medium, and easy choices, such −1, 0, +1.4 In the present study, this overall score yielded significant main ef- fects of game type, F(2, 152) = 4.43, P < .05, and trait aggression, F(1, 152) = 5.31, P < .05. The pat- tern of means was as expected, with the most positive scores by participants who had played the prosocial game and the most negative scores by those who had played a violent game.
This contrast pattern was sig- nificant, F(1, 152) = 8.40, P < .01, and accounted for 95% of the between groups variance. Of course, none of these solutions completely solve the nonin- dependence question, either with the tangram task or with the broader conceptual questions of whether people can (or do) try to help and hurt others at the same time. Nonetheless, the present study found that prosocial and violent video games with unreal- istic cartoonish characters significantly affected chil- dren’s behavior in a task where they could help or hurt another child.
We believe that there is a need for continued research using novel measures, such as the tangram task, in order to fully understand video game effects on children. Furthermore, additional work with the tangram task is needed to explore its conceptual and methodological advantages and lim- itations within the prosocial and aggressive behavior literatures.
4Note that statistically this is identical to assigning 1, 2, & 3 to the number of hard, medium, and easy tangram choices. We prefer −1, 0, & +1 because negative and positive scores indicate a preponderance of hard vs. easy choices.
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