Professor Bruce Bartholow: Violent Video Games and Desensitisation

Professor Bruce Bartholow from the University of Missouri investigates aggression and violent behaviour in the media. Though his focus on violent video game aggression is particularly insightful, as he tries to examine how the games result in violent behaviour.

In response to the profile from the profile, Charles Reineke explores the connection between violence in video games, such as Grand Theft Auto and the real world. To some extent, video games do have an impact in society, as criminals can find new motives of committing crime.

Important quotes from the profile:-

" There are very clear effects in scientific literature showing that, in the short term, playing a violent video game increases aggressive thoughts and behaviours, increases aggression-related emotion -- anger for example -- and decreases helpful behaviours." The challenge now, is to determine how violent gaming might affect players over the long term."

Professor Bartholow suggests that more research needs to be conducted into the long term effects of aggressive behaviour of violent video games, as they tend to deduce aggressive thoughts in the short term, though do not seem to instill a consistent pattern of aggression.

Though, the Professor's experiment on 39 undergraduate students being shown violent and non violent images was effective in giving an insight into how violent video games result in aggression. By being shown images such as man holding a gun in another man's mouth the levels of p300 (electrical impulses into responses to significant stimuli) manages to increase.

The study included a second, "competition" phase. When cued by a series of audible tones, the researchers told the subjects, "you and an unseen opponent must race to see who can click his computer mouse the fastest." The winner, they said, could blast his opponent's ears with a sudden noise. Nobody told the students that, in fact, there was no opponent.

In effect, his experiment concluded that "... Players of violent video games showed a significant diminution of p300 amplitude when viewing violent images. Though, the research findings also concluded that "... violent game players' p300 levels did not change when they encountered the neutral or negative, non-violent images".

Professor Bruce Bartholow also reviewed that "the subjects who showed the smallest p300 response to violent images also were the most aggressive in blasting the ears of their perceived opponents. The implication was clear: Over time, players of violent video games appeared to become desensitized to real-world violence.

On the whole, the research findings by Professor Bruce Bartholow suggests that the exposure to violent images seemingly desensitised the students, as they were seemingly used to seeing these images. The reason for this could be that the media's coverage of crime and death may desensitise events which are more dramatic or serious. Bartholow's research brought him acclaim , as his research in the New Scientist, was read by a representative in Britain's Parliament, who then queried the prime minister Tony Blair . "Is he [Tony Blair] aware of the new research published by the University of Missouri, which shows a link between violent video games and the greater propensity of people to act with violence ...?"


http://illumination.missouri.edu/spr06/pro1