Video Game Violence Literature Review in January

Video Game Violence Literature Review

In January of 2012, psychologist Christian Montag and a team of German researchers sought to explore the link between habitual video game play and reduced emotional or cognitive capability, and the findings of their study were published in an article entitled Does Excessive Play of Violent First-Person-Shooter-Video-Games Dampen Brain Activity in Response to Emotional Stimuli? Montag and his colleagues expanded on the preponderance of empirical evidence observed by similar research, which has consistently produced data indicating direct and indirect links between video games and behavioral issues, ultimately postulating that "functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are able to draw a more fine-tuned picture with respect to potential influences of violent video games by providing a link between altered brain activity and violent video gaming" (2012). The authors sought to test their hypothesis that "if long-term excessive gaming is really associated with altered emotional processing, [it] should lead to changes of the brain response in reaction to such ecological valid emotional stimuli" (Montag et al., 2012), by exposing a group of subjects to an array of targeted visual imagery including screenshots from the popular first-person shooter game Counterstrike®.

The case-control study included a total of 40 healthy male participants, 21 of whom possessed significant experience playing first-person shooter video games, and 19 of whom had no experience with this particular subgenre of video gaming. Montag and his team were careful to exclude subjects with preexisting psychological disorders or a history of drug use from the study, to assure that any links between dampened cognitive ability and video games could not be attributed to external factors. The experiment was structured so that "30 images from four picture categories were chosen for a block design fMRI experiment ... [and] participants saw 24 blocks (four image categories x six repeats) ? each block consisting of five pictures [in] categories labeled 'unpleasant,' 'pleasant,' 'neutral' and 'Counterstrike'" (Montag et al., 2012). The raw data was then subjected to rigorous statistical analysis, including analyses of variance and general linear model estimations, to assess the potential link between excessive video game play and the processing of emotion.