Playing video games before bedtime has little effect on the ability of teenage boys to fall asleep, according to a new study published in the April 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
Researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia studied 13 male subjects between the ages of 14 and 18 who had no known pre-existing sleep disorders and normally fell asleep in under 15 minutes.
During one session, the teens played the Sony PlayStation 3 action video game “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,” and one week later, they watched the 2006 Academy Award winning documentary “March of the Penguins.”
After watching the DVD, it took the boys a median of three minutes to fall asleep. After playing the game, it took the adolescents approximately 7.5 minutes to fall asleep. Furthermore, according to an April 15 American Academy of Sleep Medicine press release, none of the participants fell asleep playing “Call of Duty” but nearly a third of them did so while watching the film.
“Initially we were surprised that playing the violent video game did not lead to a much longer time taken to fall asleep,” research supervisor Michael Gradisar, a senior lecturer in clinical child psychology at the university, said in a media statement.
“Although the scientific literature is sparse when it comes to measuring sleep latency associated with playing video games, anecdotally a lot of people report difficulty falling asleep after playing video games at night,” he continued, noting that the tests were limited to 50 minutes of game time.
“With greater time invested there could be a greater emotional investment in the game,” Gradisar said. “What happens to the teen’s virtual character could begin to evoke feelings of anxiety and/or frustration that could have quite larger effects on their sleep.”
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