It has often been argued that playing violent video games causes a decrease in players' emotional empathy, desensitizing them to both so-called virtual screen violence and real violence. The scientific evidence supporting this view has often been inconclusive and in any case the subject of heated and controversial debate.
To evaluate the long-term causal effect of violent video games on the behavioral and neural correlates of empathy and emotional reactivity to violence, the two research institutes conducted a prospective experimental study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
For the experiment were recruited 89 male participants, aged between 18 and 35, with no previous experience of playing violent video gamesprecisely to avoid that a lower sensitivity to violence was already present and without previous cases of neurological or psychiatric disorders or substance abuse.
Over the course of two weeks, participants they played either a video game judged by researchers to be highly violent (Grand Theft Auto V) or a non-violent version of the same game for seven sessions of one hour each. Before and after this period, participants completed an fMRI experiment with paradigms that measured their empathy for pain and emotional reactivity to violent images.
The study found substantial evidence for theabsence of an effect of violent video games on the behavioral and neural correlates of empathy. Furthermore, participants did not show decreased sensitivity to images of real-world violence.
These results imply that brief, controlled exposure to violent video games does not appear to undermine the gamer's empathy nor responses to violence in the real world. The researchers caution, however, that although participants in the experimental group were exposed to a substantial amount of violent gameplay during their gaming sessions (each participant “killed” an average of 2845 other characters in a graphically violent way), the overall exposure to virtual violence is still considered very low compared to the amount possible in the daily life of a typical gamer. Regular gamers can play for an average of 16 hours in the same amount of time (Clement, 2021; Statista Research Department, 2022).
The results collected by the Austrian-Swedish research cannot exclude that Longer and more intense exposure to violent video games may have negative causal effects on empathy. Above all adolescents and children as well as people with specific neuropsychiatric traits might be particularly susceptible to long-term changes due to increased brain plasticity. One of the co-authors of the research, Claus Lamm, addresses the limits of the possible expansion of the research: “Are children and young people also immune to violence in video games? The young brain is highly plastic, hence repeated exposure to depictions of violence it could have a much greater effect. But obviously these questions are difficult to investigate experimentally without running into the limits of scientific ethics
“.
Despite these limitations to the applicability of the study, violent video games, often accused of facilitating aggressive behavior, would not appear to be directly responsible, at least in the average sample taken into consideration by the researchers.
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