• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Violent Video Games Cause Aggression Among Children

Posted on: Monday, 3 November 2008, 16:30 CST

A new study has found a link between simulated violence portrayed on video games and aggressive behavior of children.

In the U.S., as much as 90 percent of children ages 8 to 16 play video games for 13 hours a week or more.

Now, in a study appearing in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics, researchers set out to determine whether video games caused children to become aggressive or if aggressive children were simply drawn to violent games.

Many studies have linked violence in TV shows and video games to violent behavior. However, any state attempts to keep under-18 kids from playing games rated "M" for mature have often been challenged successfully in court.

Dr. Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D., of Iowa State University in Ames, and his colleagues looked at how children and teen's video game habits at one time point related to their behavior three to six months later.

Three groups were involved with the study. They included 181 Japanese students ages 12 to 15; 1,050 Japanese students aged 13 to 18; and 364 U.S. kids ages 9 to 12.

U.S. participants were asked to list their top three video games and how often they played them. The younger group was used to determine how often they played games from different genres.

In the older group, researchers gauged the violence in the kids' favorite game genres and the time they spent playing them each week.

Researchers found that the level of aggression was on target with levels of violent video game use.

This was true even after the researchers took into account how aggressive the children were at the beginning of the study -- a strong predictor of future bad behavior.

The findings are "pretty good evidence" that violent video games do indeed cause aggressive behavior, says Dr. L. Rowell Huesmann, director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor.

Huesmann said violent media causes people to engage in violent behavior through two ways: imitation and desensitization.

"When you're exposed to violence day in and day out, it loses its emotional impact on you," Huesmann said. "Once you're emotionally numb to violence, it's much easier to engage in violence."

"It's not the violence per se that's the problem, it's the context and goals of the violence," argues Dr. Cheryl K. Olson, co-director of the Center for Mental Health and the Media at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

"I think there may well be problems with some kinds of violent games for some kinds of kids," Olson said. "We may find things we should be worried about, but right now we don't know enough."

---

On the Net:

• Pediatrics
• Iowa State University

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

More News in this Category