The Effects Of Different Violent Game Operations On Aggressive Behavior

In spite of the involved violent content, video game is still a major entertainment media forchildren and adolescents and its prevalence and impact for children and adolescents have attractedthe psychologists’ interests. Based on the General Aggression Model (GAM), many studies havefound that violent video games can improve the players’ aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition,hostility and physiological arousal level, and can also reduce the players’ pro-social behavior. Therecould be a desensitization effect on the real scene of violence for the one who frequently playviolent video games. In recent years, with the increasing popularity of the motion detectionoperation-based video games, the negative effects of the relevant violent games on the players haveattracted much focus from the academic field. However, the existing literatures are insufficient andthe conclusions are inconsistent. What is more, the conclusion may even contradict each other.On the basis of the GAM, the present study adopted the experimental tools which were widelyused for the study of aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, hostility and physiological arousallevel to explore the effect of violent video game operations on the players. In the study, participantswere divided into two groups, namely, high and low experienced violent video game players with aself-prepared questionnaire about the experience of playing video games. The effect of differentviolent game operations on aggressive behavior and its psychological mechanism were explored byfour experiments, i.e., competitive reaction time task, lexical decision task, the state hostility scaleand biofeedback instrument. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) Compared with traditional mode of operation, the motion detection can improve highexperienced violent video game players`aggressive behavior.(2) By comparison with traditional game mode of operation, the motion detection can activatethe aggressive cognition of both high and low experienced violent video game players.(3) Compared with the low experienced violent video game players, the high one couldexperience lower positive emotion as gentleness and empathy exposure to the violent video game.Nonetheless, no significant effect could be found in anger.(4) In comparison with motion detection game mode of operation, the traditional operationcan significantly increase the skin temperature of the violent video game players while nosignificant effect could be found on skin conductance.