research about video games and violence

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Open access
• Published: 13 March 2018

Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study

• Simone Kühn 1 , 2 ,
• Dimitrij Tycho Kugler 2 ,
• Katharina Schmalen 1 ,
• Markus Weichenberger 1 ,
• Charlotte Witt 1 &
• Jürgen Gallinat 2  

Molecular Psychiatry volume  24 ,  pages 1220–1234 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

557k Accesses

110 Citations

2349 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Neuroscience

It is a widespread concern that violent video games promote aggression, reduce pro-social behaviour, increase impulsivity and interfere with cognition as well as mood in its players. Previous experimental studies have focussed on short-term effects of violent video gameplay on aggression, yet there are reasons to believe that these effects are mostly the result of priming. In contrast, the present study is the first to investigate the effects of long-term violent video gameplay using a large battery of tests spanning questionnaires, behavioural measures of aggression, sexist attitudes, empathy and interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs (such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness, risk taking, delay discounting), mental health (depressivity, anxiety) as well as executive control functions, before and after 2 months of gameplay. Our participants played the violent video game Grand Theft Auto V, the non-violent video game The Sims 3 or no game at all for 2 months on a daily basis. No significant changes were observed, neither when comparing the group playing a violent video game to a group playing a non-violent game, nor to a passive control group. Also, no effects were observed between baseline and posttest directly after the intervention, nor between baseline and a follow-up assessment 2 months after the intervention period had ended. The present results thus provide strong evidence against the frequently debated negative effects of playing violent video games in adults and will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective on the effects of violent video gaming.

Similar content being viewed by others

The associations between autistic characteristics and microtransaction spending

No effect of short term exposure to gambling like reward systems on post game risk taking

Increasing prosocial behavior and decreasing selfishness in the lab and everyday life

The concern that violent video games may promote aggression or reduce empathy in its players is pervasive and given the popularity of these games their psychological impact is an urgent issue for society at large. Contrary to the custom, this topic has also been passionately debated in the scientific literature. One research camp has strongly argued that violent video games increase aggression in its players [ 1 , 2 ], whereas the other camp [ 3 , 4 ] repeatedly concluded that the effects are minimal at best, if not absent. Importantly, it appears that these fundamental inconsistencies cannot be attributed to differences in research methodology since even meta-analyses, with the goal to integrate the results of all prior studies on the topic of aggression caused by video games led to disparate conclusions [ 2 , 3 ]. These meta-analyses had a strong focus on children, and one of them [ 2 ] reported a marginal age effect suggesting that children might be even more susceptible to violent video game effects.

To unravel this topic of research, we designed a randomised controlled trial on adults to draw causal conclusions on the influence of video games on aggression. At present, almost all experimental studies targeting the effects of violent video games on aggression and/or empathy focussed on the effects of short-term video gameplay. In these studies the duration for which participants were instructed to play the games ranged from 4 min to maximally 2 h (mean = 22 min, median = 15 min, when considering all experimental studies reviewed in two of the recent major meta-analyses in the field [ 3 , 5 ]) and most frequently the effects of video gaming have been tested directly after gameplay.

It has been suggested that the effects of studies focussing on consequences of short-term video gameplay (mostly conducted on college student populations) are mainly the result of priming effects, meaning that exposure to violent content increases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts and affect when participants are in the immediate situation [ 6 ]. However, above and beyond this the General Aggression Model (GAM, [ 7 ]) assumes that repeatedly primed thoughts and feelings influence the perception of ongoing events and therewith elicits aggressive behaviour as a long-term effect. We think that priming effects are interesting and worthwhile exploring, but in contrast to the notion of the GAM our reading of the literature is that priming effects are short-lived (suggested to only last for <5 min and may potentially reverse after that time [ 8 ]). Priming effects should therefore only play a role in very close temporal proximity to gameplay. Moreover, there are a multitude of studies on college students that have failed to replicate priming effects [ 9 , 10 , 11 ] and associated predictions of the so-called GAM such as a desensitisation against violent content [ 12 , 13 , 14 ] in adolescents and college students or a decrease of empathy [ 15 ] and pro-social behaviour [ 16 , 17 ] as a result of playing violent video games.

However, in our view the question that society is actually interested in is not: “Are people more aggressive after having played violent video games for a few minutes? And are these people more aggressive minutes after gameplay ended?”, but rather “What are the effects of frequent, habitual violent video game playing? And for how long do these effects persist (not in the range of minutes but rather weeks and months)?” For this reason studies are needed in which participants are trained over longer periods of time, tested after a longer delay after acute playing and tested with broader batteries assessing aggression but also other relevant domains such as empathy as well as mood and cognition. Moreover, long-term follow-up assessments are needed to demonstrate long-term effects of frequent violent video gameplay. To fill this gap, we set out to expose adult participants to two different types of video games for a period of 2 months and investigate changes in measures of various constructs of interest at least one day after the last gaming session and test them once more 2 months after the end of the gameplay intervention. In contrast to the GAM, we hypothesised no increases of aggression or decreases in pro-social behaviour even after long-term exposure to a violent video game due to our reasoning that priming effects of violent video games are short-lived and should therefore not influence measures of aggression if they are not measured directly after acute gaming. In the present study, we assessed potential changes in the following domains: behavioural as well as questionnaire measures of aggression, empathy and interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs (such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness, risk taking, delay discounting), and depressivity and anxiety as well as executive control functions. As the effects on aggression and pro-social behaviour were the core targets of the present study, we implemented multiple tests for these domains. This broad range of domains with its wide coverage and the longitudinal nature of the study design enabled us to draw more general conclusions regarding the causal effects of violent video games.

Materials and methods

Participants.

Ninety healthy participants (mean age = 28 years, SD = 7.3, range: 18–45, 48 females) were recruited by means of flyers and internet advertisements. The sample consisted of college students as well as of participants from the general community. The advertisement mentioned that we were recruiting for a longitudinal study on video gaming, but did not mention that we would offer an intervention or that we were expecting training effects. Participants were randomly assigned to the three groups ruling out self-selection effects. The sample size was based on estimates from a previous study with a similar design [ 18 ]. After complete description of the study, the participants’ informed written consent was obtained. The local ethics committee of the Charité University Clinic, Germany, approved of the study. We included participants that reported little, preferably no video game usage in the past 6 months (none of the participants ever played the game Grand Theft Auto V (GTA) or Sims 3 in any of its versions before). We excluded participants with psychological or neurological problems. The participants received financial compensation for the testing sessions (200 Euros) and performance-dependent additional payment for two behavioural tasks detailed below, but received no money for the training itself.

Training procedure

The violent video game group (5 participants dropped out between pre- and posttest, resulting in a group of n  = 25, mean age = 26.6 years, SD = 6.0, 14 females) played the game Grand Theft Auto V on a Playstation 3 console over a period of 8 weeks. The active control group played the non-violent video game Sims 3 on the same console (6 participants dropped out, resulting in a group of n  = 24, mean age = 25.8 years, SD = 6.8, 12 females). The passive control group (2 participants dropped out, resulting in a group of n  = 28, mean age = 30.9 years, SD = 8.4, 12 females) was not given a gaming console and had no task but underwent the same testing procedure as the two other groups. The passive control group was not aware of the fact that they were part of a control group to prevent self-training attempts. The experimenters testing the participants were blind to group membership, but we were unable to prevent participants from talking about the game during testing, which in some cases lead to an unblinding of experimental condition. Both training groups were instructed to play the game for at least 30 min a day. Participants were only reimbursed for the sessions in which they came to the lab. Our previous research suggests that the perceived fun in gaming was positively associated with training outcome [ 18 ] and we speculated that enforcing training sessions through payment would impair motivation and thus diminish the potential effect of the intervention. Participants underwent a testing session before (baseline) and after the training period of 2 months (posttest 1) as well as a follow-up testing sessions 2 months after the training period (posttest 2).

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA)

GTA is an action-adventure video game situated in a fictional highly violent game world in which players are rewarded for their use of violence as a means to advance in the game. The single-player story follows three criminals and their efforts to commit heists while under pressure from a government agency. The gameplay focuses on an open world (sandbox game) where the player can choose between different behaviours. The game also allows the player to engage in various side activities, such as action-adventure, driving, third-person shooting, occasional role-playing, stealth and racing elements. The open world design lets players freely roam around the fictional world so that gamers could in principle decide not to commit violent acts.

The Sims 3 (Sims)

Sims is a life simulation game and also classified as a sandbox game because it lacks clearly defined goals. The player creates virtual individuals called “Sims”, and customises their appearance, their personalities and places them in a home, directs their moods, satisfies their desires and accompanies them in their daily activities and by becoming part of a social network. It offers opportunities, which the player may choose to pursue or to refuse, similar as GTA but is generally considered as a pro-social and clearly non-violent game.

Assessment battery

To assess aggression and associated constructs we used the following questionnaires: Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire [ 19 ], State Hostility Scale [ 20 ], Updated Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale [ 21 , 22 ], Moral Disengagement Scale [ 23 , 24 ], the Rosenzweig Picture Frustration Test [ 25 , 26 ] and a so-called World View Measure [ 27 ]. All of these measures have previously been used in research investigating the effects of violent video gameplay, however, the first two most prominently. Additionally, behavioural measures of aggression were used: a Word Completion Task, a Lexical Decision Task [ 28 ] and the Delay frustration task [ 29 ] (an inter-correlation matrix is depicted in Supplementary Figure 1 1). From these behavioural measures, the first two were previously used in research on the effects of violent video gameplay. To assess variables that have been related to the construct of impulsivity, we used the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale [ 30 ] and the Boredom Propensity Scale [ 31 ] as well as tasks assessing risk taking and delay discounting behaviourally, namely the Balloon Analogue Risk Task [ 32 ] and a Delay-Discounting Task [ 33 ]. To quantify pro-social behaviour, we employed: Interpersonal Reactivity Index [ 34 ] (frequently used in research on the effects of violent video gameplay), Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale [ 35 ], Reading the Mind in the Eyes test [ 36 ], Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire [ 37 ] and Richardson Conflict Response Questionnaire [ 38 ]. To assess depressivity and anxiety, which has previously been associated with intense video game playing [ 39 ], we used Beck Depression Inventory [ 40 ] and State Trait Anxiety Inventory [ 41 ]. To characterise executive control function, we used a Stop Signal Task [ 42 ], a Multi-Source Interference Task [ 43 ] and a Task Switching Task [ 44 ] which have all been previously used to assess effects of video gameplay. More details on all instruments used can be found in the Supplementary Material.

Data analysis

On the basis of the research question whether violent video game playing enhances aggression and reduces empathy, the focus of the present analysis was on time by group interactions. We conducted these interaction analyses separately, comparing the violent video game group against the active control group (GTA vs. Sims) and separately against the passive control group (GTA vs. Controls) that did not receive any intervention and separately for the potential changes during the intervention period (baseline vs. posttest 1) and to test for potential long-term changes (baseline vs. posttest 2). We employed classical frequentist statistics running a repeated-measures ANOVA controlling for the covariates sex and age.

Since we collected 52 separate outcome variables and conduced four different tests with each (GTA vs. Sims, GTA vs. Controls, crossed with baseline vs. posttest 1, baseline vs. posttest 2), we had to conduct 52 × 4 = 208 frequentist statistical tests. Setting the alpha value to 0.05 means that by pure chance about 10.4 analyses should become significant. To account for this multiple testing problem and the associated alpha inflation, we conducted a Bonferroni correction. According to Bonferroni, the critical value for the entire set of n tests is set to an alpha value of 0.05 by taking alpha/ n  = 0.00024.

Since the Bonferroni correction has sometimes been criticised as overly conservative, we conducted false discovery rate (FDR) correction [ 45 ]. FDR correction also determines adjusted p -values for each test, however, it controls only for the number of false discoveries in those tests that result in a discovery (namely a significant result).

Moreover, we tested for group differences at the baseline assessment using independent t -tests, since those may hamper the interpretation of significant interactions between group and time that we were primarily interested in.

Since the frequentist framework does not enable to evaluate whether the observed null effect of the hypothesised interaction is indicative of the absence of a relation between violent video gaming and our dependent variables, the amount of evidence in favour of the null hypothesis has been tested using a Bayesian framework. Within the Bayesian framework both the evidence in favour of the null and the alternative hypothesis are directly computed based on the observed data, giving rise to the possibility of comparing the two. We conducted Bayesian repeated-measures ANOVAs comparing the model in favour of the null and the model in favour of the alternative hypothesis resulting in a Bayes factor (BF) using Bayesian Information criteria [ 46 ]. The BF 01 suggests how much more likely the data is to occur under the null hypothesis. All analyses were performed using the JASP software package ( https://jasp-stats.org ).

Sex distribution in the present study did not differ across the groups ( χ 2 p -value > 0.414). However, due to the fact that differences between males and females have been observed in terms of aggression and empathy [ 47 ], we present analyses controlling for sex. Since our random assignment to the three groups did result in significant age differences between groups, with the passive control group being significantly older than the GTA ( t (51) = −2.10, p  = 0.041) and the Sims group ( t (50) = −2.38, p  = 0.021), we also controlled for age.

The participants in the violent video game group played on average 35 h and the non-violent video game group 32 h spread out across the 8 weeks interval (with no significant group difference p  = 0.48).

To test whether participants assigned to the violent GTA game show emotional, cognitive and behavioural changes, we present the results of repeated-measure ANOVA time x group interaction analyses separately for GTA vs. Sims and GTA vs. Controls (Tables  1 – 3 ). Moreover, we split the analyses according to the time domain into effects from baseline assessment to posttest 1 (Table  2 ) and effects from baseline assessment to posttest 2 (Table  3 ) to capture more long-lasting or evolving effects. In addition to the statistical test values, we report partial omega squared ( ω 2 ) as an effect size measure. Next to the classical frequentist statistics, we report the results of a Bayesian statistical approach, namely BF 01 , the likelihood with which the data is to occur under the null hypothesis that there is no significant time × group interaction. In Table  2 , we report the presence of significant group differences at baseline in the right most column.

Since we conducted 208 separate frequentist tests we expected 10.4 significant effects simply by chance when setting the alpha value to 0.05. In fact we found only eight significant time × group interactions (these are marked with an asterisk in Tables  2 and 3 ).

When applying a conservative Bonferroni correction, none of those tests survive the corrected threshold of p  < 0.00024. Neither does any test survive the more lenient FDR correction. The arithmetic mean of the frequentist test statistics likewise shows that on average no significant effect was found (bottom rows in Tables  2 and 3 ).

In line with the findings from a frequentist approach, the harmonic mean of the Bayesian factor BF 01 is consistently above one but not very far from one. This likewise suggests that there is very likely no interaction between group × time and therewith no detrimental effects of the violent video game GTA in the domains tested. The evidence in favour of the null hypothesis based on the Bayes factor is not massive, but clearly above 1. Some of the harmonic means are above 1.6 and constitute substantial evidence [ 48 ]. However, the harmonic mean has been criticised as unstable. Owing to the fact that the sum is dominated by occasional small terms in the likelihood, one may underestimate the actual evidence in favour of the null hypothesis [ 49 ].

To test the sensitivity of the present study to detect relevant effects we computed the effect size that we would have been able to detect. The information we used consisted of alpha error probability = 0.05, power = 0.95, our sample size, number of groups and of measurement occasions and correlation between the repeated measures at posttest 1 and posttest 2 (average r  = 0.68). According to G*Power [ 50 ], we could detect small effect sizes of f  = 0.16 (equals η 2  = 0.025 and r  = 0.16) in each separate test. When accounting for the conservative Bonferroni-corrected p -value of 0.00024, still a medium effect size of f  = 0.23 (equals η 2  = 0.05 and r  = 0.22) would have been detectable. A meta-analysis by Anderson [ 2 ] reported an average effects size of r  = 0.18 for experimental studies testing for aggressive behaviour and another by Greitmeyer [ 5 ] reported average effect sizes of r  = 0.19, 0.25 and 0.17 for effects of violent games on aggressive behaviour, cognition and affect, all of which should have been detectable at least before multiple test correction.

Within the scope of the present study we tested the potential effects of playing the violent video game GTA V for 2 months against an active control group that played the non-violent, rather pro-social life simulation game The Sims 3 and a passive control group. Participants were tested before and after the long-term intervention and at a follow-up appointment 2 months later. Although we used a comprehensive test battery consisting of questionnaires and computerised behavioural tests assessing aggression, impulsivity-related constructs, mood, anxiety, empathy, interpersonal competencies and executive control functions, we did not find relevant negative effects in response to violent video game playing. In fact, only three tests of the 208 statistical tests performed showed a significant interaction pattern that would be in line with this hypothesis. Since at least ten significant effects would be expected purely by chance, we conclude that there were no detrimental effects of violent video gameplay.

This finding stands in contrast to some experimental studies, in which short-term effects of violent video game exposure have been investigated and where increases in aggressive thoughts and affect as well as decreases in helping behaviour have been observed [ 1 ]. However, these effects of violent video gaming on aggressiveness—if present at all (see above)—seem to be rather short-lived, potentially lasting <15 min [ 8 , 51 ]. In addition, these short-term effects of video gaming are far from consistent as multiple studies fail to demonstrate or replicate them [ 16 , 17 ]. This may in part be due to problems, that are very prominent in this field of research, namely that the outcome measures of aggression and pro-social behaviour, are poorly standardised, do not easily generalise to real-life behaviour and may have lead to selective reporting of the results [ 3 ]. We tried to address these concerns by including a large set of outcome measures that were mostly inspired by previous studies demonstrating effects of short-term violent video gameplay on aggressive behaviour and thoughts, that we report exhaustively.

Since effects observed only for a few minutes after short sessions of video gaming are not representative of what society at large is actually interested in, namely how habitual violent video gameplay affects behaviour on a more long-term basis, studies employing longer training intervals are highly relevant. Two previous studies have employed longer training intervals. In an online study, participants with a broad age range (14–68 years) have been trained in a violent video game for 4 weeks [ 52 ]. In comparison to a passive control group no changes were observed, neither in aggression-related beliefs, nor in aggressive social interactions assessed by means of two questions. In a more recent study, participants played a previous version of GTA for 12 h spread across 3 weeks [ 53 ]. Participants were compared to a passive control group using the Buss–Perry aggression questionnaire, a questionnaire assessing impulsive or reactive aggression, attitude towards violence, and empathy. The authors only report a limited increase in pro-violent attitude. Unfortunately, this study only assessed posttest measures, which precludes the assessment of actual changes caused by the game intervention.

The present study goes beyond these studies by showing that 2 months of violent video gameplay does neither lead to any significant negative effects in a broad assessment battery administered directly after the intervention nor at a follow-up assessment 2 months after the intervention. The fact that we assessed multiple domains, not finding an effect in any of them, makes the present study the most comprehensive in the field. Our battery included self-report instruments on aggression (Buss–Perry aggression questionnaire, State Hostility scale, Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance scale, Moral Disengagement scale, World View Measure and Rosenzweig Picture Frustration test) as well as computer-based tests measuring aggressive behaviour such as the delay frustration task and measuring the availability of aggressive words using the word completion test and a lexical decision task. Moreover, we assessed impulse-related concepts such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness and associated behavioural measures such as the computerised Balloon analogue risk task, and delay discounting. Four scales assessing empathy and interpersonal competence scales, including the reading the mind in the eyes test revealed no effects of violent video gameplay. Neither did we find any effects on depressivity (Becks depression inventory) nor anxiety measured as a state as well as a trait. This is an important point, since several studies reported higher rates of depressivity and anxiety in populations of habitual video gamers [ 54 , 55 ]. Last but not least, our results revealed also no substantial changes in executive control tasks performance, neither in the Stop signal task, the Multi-source interference task or a Task switching task. Previous studies have shown higher performance of habitual action video gamers in executive tasks such as task switching [ 56 , 57 , 58 ] and another study suggests that training with action video games improves task performance that relates to executive functions [ 59 ], however, these associations were not confirmed by a meta-analysis in the field [ 60 ]. The absence of changes in the stop signal task fits well with previous studies that likewise revealed no difference between in habitual action video gamers and controls in terms of action inhibition [ 61 , 62 ]. Although GTA does not qualify as a classical first-person shooter as most of the previously tested action video games, it is classified as an action-adventure game and shares multiple features with those action video games previously related to increases in executive function, including the need for hand–eye coordination and fast reaction times.

Taken together, the findings of the present study show that an extensive game intervention over the course of 2 months did not reveal any specific changes in aggression, empathy, interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs, depressivity, anxiety or executive control functions; neither in comparison to an active control group that played a non-violent video game nor to a passive control group. We observed no effects when comparing a baseline and a post-training assessment, nor when focussing on more long-term effects between baseline and a follow-up interval 2 months after the participants stopped training. To our knowledge, the present study employed the most comprehensive test battery spanning a multitude of domains in which changes due to violent video games may have been expected. Therefore the present results provide strong evidence against the frequently debated negative effects of playing violent video games. This debate has mostly been informed by studies showing short-term effects of violent video games when tests were administered immediately after a short playtime of a few minutes; effects that may in large be caused by short-lived priming effects that vanish after minutes. The presented results will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective of the real-life effects of violent video gaming. However, future research is needed to demonstrate the absence of effects of violent video gameplay in children.

Anderson CA, Bushman BJ. Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: a meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychol Sci. 2001;12:353–9.

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Anderson CA, Shibuya A, Ihori N, Swing EL, Bushman BJ, Sakamoto A, et al. Violent video game effects on aggression, empathy, and prosocial behavior in eastern and western countries: a meta-analytic review. Psychol Bull. 2010;136:151–73.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ferguson CJ. Do angry birds make for angry children? A meta-analysis of video game influences on children’s and adolescents’ aggression, mental health, prosocial behavior, and academic performance. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2015;10:646–66.

Ferguson CJ, Kilburn J. Much ado about nothing: the misestimation and overinterpretation of violent video game effects in eastern and western nations: comment on Anderson et al. (2010). Psychol Bull. 2010;136:174–8.

Greitemeyer T, Mugge DO. Video games do affect social outcomes: a meta-analytic review of the effects of violent and prosocial video game play. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2014;40:578–89.

Anderson CA, Carnagey NL, Eubanks J. Exposure to violent media: The effects of songs with violent lyrics on aggressive thoughts and feelings. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2003;84:960–71.

DeWall CN, Anderson CA, Bushman BJ. The general aggression model: theoretical extensions to violence. Psychol Violence. 2011;1:245–58.

Sestire MA, Bartholow BD. Violent and non-violent video games produce opposing effects on aggressive and prosocial outcomes. J Exp Soc Psychol. 2010;46:934–42.

Kneer J, Elson M, Knapp F. Fight fire with rainbows: The effects of displayed violence, difficulty, and performance in digital games on affect, aggression, and physiological arousal. Comput Hum Behav. 2016;54:142–8.

Kneer J, Glock S, Beskes S, Bente G. Are digital games perceived as fun or danger? Supporting and suppressing different game-related concepts. Cyber Beh Soc N. 2012;15:604–9.

Sauer JD, Drummond A, Nova N. Violent video games: the effects of narrative context and reward structure on in-game and postgame aggression. J Exp Psychol Appl. 2015;21:205–14.

Ballard M, Visser K, Jocoy K. Social context and video game play: impact on cardiovascular and affective responses. Mass Commun Soc. 2012;15:875–98.

Read GL, Ballard M, Emery LJ, Bazzini DG. Examining desensitization using facial electromyography: violent video games, gender, and affective responding. Comput Hum Behav. 2016;62:201–11.

Szycik GR, Mohammadi B, Hake M, Kneer J, Samii A, Munte TF, et al. Excessive users of violent video games do not show emotional desensitization: an fMRI study. Brain Imaging Behav. 2017;11:736–43.

Szycik GR, Mohammadi B, Munte TF, Te Wildt BT. Lack of evidence that neural empathic responses are blunted in excessive users of violent video games: an fMRI study. Front Psychol. 2017;8:174.

Tear MJ, Nielsen M. Failure to demonstrate that playing violent video games diminishes prosocial behavior. PLoS ONE. 2013;8:e68382.

Tear MJ, Nielsen M. Video games and prosocial behavior: a study of the effects of non-violent, violent and ultra-violent gameplay. Comput Hum Behav. 2014;41:8–13.

Kühn S, Gleich T, Lorenz RC, Lindenberger U, Gallinat J. Playing super Mario induces structural brain plasticity: gray matter changes resulting from training with a commercial video game. Mol Psychiatry. 2014;19:265–71.

Buss AH, Perry M. The aggression questionnaire. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1992;63:452.

Anderson CA, Deuser WE, DeNeve KM. Hot temperatures, hostile affect, hostile cognition, and arousal: Tests of a general model of affective aggression. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 1995;21:434–48.

Payne DL, Lonsway KA, Fitzgerald LF. Rape myth acceptance: exploration of its structure and its measurement using the illinois rape myth acceptance scale. J Res Pers. 1999;33:27–68.

McMahon S, Farmer GL. An updated measure for assessing subtle rape myths. Social Work Res. 2011; 35:71–81.

Detert JR, Trevino LK, Sweitzer VL. Moral disengagement in ethical decision making: a study of antecedents and outcomes. J Appl Psychol. 2008;93:374–91.

Bandura A, Barbaranelli C, Caprara G, Pastorelli C. Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1996;71:364–74.

Rosenzweig S. The picture-association method and its application in a study of reactions to frustration. J Pers. 1945;14:23.

Hörmann H, Moog W, Der Rosenzweig P-F. Test für Erwachsene deutsche Bearbeitung. Göttingen: Hogrefe; 1957.

Anderson CA, Dill KE. Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2000;78:772–90.

Przybylski AK, Deci EL, Rigby CS, Ryan RM. Competence-impeding electronic games and players’ aggressive feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2014;106:441.

Bitsakou P, Antrop I, Wiersema JR, Sonuga-Barke EJ. Probing the limits of delay intolerance: preliminary young adult data from the Delay Frustration Task (DeFT). J Neurosci Methods. 2006;151:38–44.

Hoyle RH, Stephenson MT, Palmgreen P, Lorch EP, Donohew RL. Reliability and validity of a brief measure of sensation seeking. Pers Individ Dif. 2002;32:401–14.

Farmer R, Sundberg ND. Boredom proneness: the development and correlates of a new scale. J Pers Assess. 1986;50:4–17.

Lejuez CW, Read JP, Kahler CW, Richards JB, Ramsey SE, Stuart GL, et al. Evaluation of a behavioral measure of risk taking: the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). J Exp Psychol Appl. 2002;8:75–84.

Richards JB, Zhang L, Mitchell SH, de Wit H. Delay or probability discounting in a model of impulsive behavior: effect of alcohol. J Exp Anal Behav. 1999;71:121–43.

Davis MH. A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Cat Sel Doc Psychol. 1980;10:85.

Google Scholar  

Mehrabian A. Manual for the Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES). (Available from Albert Mehrabian, 1130 Alta Mesa Road, Monterey, CA, USA 93940); 1996.

Baron-Cohen S, Wheelwright S, Hill J, Raste Y, Plumb I. The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2001;42:241–51.

Buhrmester D, Furman W, Reis H, Wittenberg MT. Five domains of interpersonal competence in peer relations. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1988;55:991–1008.

Richardson DR, Green LR, Lago T. The relationship between perspective-taking and non-aggressive responding in the face of an attack. J Pers. 1998;66:235–56.

Maras D, Flament MF, Murray M, Buchholz A, Henderson KA, Obeid N, et al. Screen time is associated with depression and anxiety in Canadian youth. Prev Med. 2015;73:133–8.

Hautzinger M, Bailer M, Worall H, Keller F. Beck-Depressions-Inventar (BDI). Beck-Depressions-Inventar (BDI): Testhandbuch der deutschen Ausgabe. Bern: Huber; 1995.

Spielberger CD, Spielberger CD, Sydeman SJ, Sydeman SJ, Owen AE, Owen AE, et al. Measuring anxiety and anger with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers; 1999.

Lorenz RC, Gleich T, Buchert R, Schlagenhauf F, Kuhn S, Gallinat J. Interactions between glutamate, dopamine, and the neuronal signature of response inhibition in the human striatum. Hum Brain Mapp. 2015;36:4031–40.

Bush G, Shin LM. The multi-source interference task: an fMRI task that reliably activates the cingulo-frontal-parietal cognitive/attention network. Nat Protoc. 2006;1:308–13.

King JA, Colla M, Brass M, Heuser I, von Cramon D. Inefficient cognitive control in adult ADHD: evidence from trial-by-trial Stroop test and cued task switching performance. Behav Brain Funct. 2007;3:42.

Benjamini Y, Hochberg Y. Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. J R Stat Soc. 1995;57:289–300.

Wagenmakers E-J. A practical solution to the pervasive problems of p values. Psychon Bull Rev. 2007;14:779–804.

Hay DF. The gradual emergence of sex differences in aggression: alternative hypotheses. Psychol Med. 2007;37:1527–37.

Jeffreys H. The Theory of Probability. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1961.

Raftery AE, Newton MA, Satagopan YM, Krivitsky PN. Estimating the integrated likelihood via posterior simulation using the harmonic mean identity. In: Bernardo JM, Bayarri MJ, Berger JO, Dawid AP, Heckerman D, Smith AFM, et al., editors. Bayesian statistics. Oxford: University Press; 2007.

Faul F, Erdfelder E, Lang A-G, Buchner A. G*Power3: a flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behav Res Methods. 2007;39:175–91.

Barlett C, Branch O, Rodeheffer C, Harris R. How long do the short-term violent video game effects last? Aggress Behav. 2009;35:225–36.

Williams D, Skoric M. Internet fantasy violence: a test of aggression in an online game. Commun Monogr. 2005;72:217–33.

Teng SK, Chong GY, Siew AS, Skoric MM. Grand theft auto IV comes to Singapore: effects of repeated exposure to violent video games on aggression. Cyber Behav Soc Netw. 2011;14:597–602.

van Rooij AJ, Kuss DJ, Griffiths MD, Shorter GW, Schoenmakers TM, Van, de Mheen D. The (co-)occurrence of problematic video gaming, substance use, and psychosocial problems in adolescents. J Behav Addict. 2014;3:157–65.

Brunborg GS, Mentzoni RA, Froyland LR. Is video gaming, or video game addiction, associated with depression, academic achievement, heavy episodic drinking, or conduct problems? J Behav Addict. 2014;3:27–32.

Green CS, Sugarman MA, Medford K, Klobusicky E, Bavelier D. The effect of action video game experience on task switching. Comput Hum Behav. 2012;28:984–94.

Strobach T, Frensch PA, Schubert T. Video game practice optimizes executive control skills in dual-task and task switching situations. Acta Psychol. 2012;140:13–24.

Colzato LS, van Leeuwen PJ, van den Wildenberg WP, Hommel B. DOOM’d to switch: superior cognitive flexibility in players of first person shooter games. Front Psychol. 2010;1:8.

PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Hutchinson CV, Barrett DJK, Nitka A, Raynes K. Action video game training reduces the Simon effect. Psychon B Rev. 2016;23:587–92.

Powers KL, Brooks PJ, Aldrich NJ, Palladino MA, Alfieri L. Effects of video-game play on information processing: a meta-analytic investigation. Psychon Bull Rev. 2013;20:1055–79.

Colzato LS, van den Wildenberg WP, Zmigrod S, Hommel B. Action video gaming and cognitive control: playing first person shooter games is associated with improvement in working memory but not action inhibition. Psychol Res. 2013;77:234–9.

Steenbergen L, Sellaro R, Stock AK, Beste C, Colzato LS. Action video gaming and cognitive control: playing first person shooter games is associated with improved action cascading but not inhibition. PLoS ONE. 2015;10:e0144364.

Download references

Acknowledgements

SK has been funded by a Heisenberg grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG KU 3322/1-1, SFB 936/C7), the European Union (ERC-2016-StG-Self-Control-677804) and a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation (JRF 2016–2018).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Lifespan Psychology, Lentzeallee 94, 14195, Berlin, Germany

Simone Kühn, Katharina Schmalen, Markus Weichenberger & Charlotte Witt

Clinic and Policlinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinistraße 52, 20246, Hamburg, Germany

Simone Kühn, Dimitrij Tycho Kugler & Jürgen Gallinat

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simone Kühn .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary material, rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Kühn, S., Kugler, D., Schmalen, K. et al. Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study. Mol Psychiatry 24 , 1220–1234 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-018-0031-7

Download citation

Received : 19 August 2017

Revised : 03 January 2018

Accepted : 15 January 2018

Published : 13 March 2018

Issue Date : August 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-018-0031-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

Far from the future: internet addiction association with delay discounting among adolescence.

• Huaiyuan Qi

International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction (2024)

The effect of competitive context in nonviolent video games on aggression: The mediating role of frustration and the moderating role of gender

• Jinqian Liao
• Yanling Liu

Current Psychology (2024)

Geeks versus climate change: understanding American video gamers’ engagement with global warming

• Jennifer P. Carman
• Marina Psaros
• Anthony Leiserowitz

Climatic Change (2024)

Exposure to hate speech deteriorates neurocognitive mechanisms of the ability to understand others’ pain

• Agnieszka Pluta
• Joanna Mazurek
• Michał Bilewicz

Scientific Reports (2023)

The effects of violent video games on reactive-proactive aggression and cyberbullying

• Yunus Emre Dönmez

Current Psychology (2023)

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Blame Game: Violent Video Games Do Not Cause Violence

What research shows us about the link between violent video games and behavior..

Updated June 9, 2024 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

• How Can I Manage My Anger?
• Take our Anger Management Test
• Find a therapist to heal from anger

In February 2018, President Trump stated in response to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida that “the level of violence (in) video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.” He’s far from the first to suggest that violent video games make children violent.

It certainly looks like they do. Jimmy Kimmel humorously pointed this out when he challenged parents to turn off their children’s TVs while they were playing the popular shooter game Fortnite and film the results. Unsurprisingly, many of the children lashed out, some cursing, others striking their parents.

The research

Decades of research seem to support this, too. Three common ways that researchers test levels of aggression in a laboratory are with a “hot sauce paradigm,” the “Competitive Reaction Time Test,” and with word or story completion tasks.

In the hot sauce paradigm , researchers instruct participants to prepare a cup of hot sauce for a taste tester. They inform them that the taste tester must consume all of the hot sauce in the cup and that the taste tester detests spicy food. The more hot sauce the participants put into the cup, the more “aggressive” the participants are said to be.

In the Competitive Reaction Time Test , participants compete with a person in the next room. They are told that both people must press a button as fast as possible when they see a light flash. Whoever presses the button first will get to “punish” the opponent with a blast of white noise. They are allowed to turn up the volume as loud and as long as they want. In reality, there is no participant in the next room; the test is designed to let people win exactly half of the games. The researchers are measuring how far they turned the dial and how long they held it for. In theory, people who punish their opponent more severely are more aggressive.

During a word or story completion task , participants are shown a word with missing letters or a story without an ending. Participants are asked to guess what word can be made from those letters or to predict what will happen next in a story. When participants choose “aggressive” words (such as assuming that “M _ _ _ E R” is “murder” instead of “mother”) or assuming that characters will hurt one another, they are considered more aggressive.

These tests have been used to examine whether violent games increase aggression. Several representative studies are summarized below. In each study, the participants assigned to play a violent game seemed more prone to acting or thinking aggressively than those who played a non-violent game for an equivalent amount of time.

• 2000: Undergraduate psychology students played a video game for 30 minutes and were given the Competitive Reaction Time Test. Those who played Wolfenstein 3D (a violent game) turned the “ punishment ” dial for a longer period of time than those who played Myst (a non-violent game).
• 2002: Participants played a video game for 20 minutes and were given a story completion task. Players who played Carmageddon , Duke Nukem , Mortal Kombat , or Future Cop (violent games) were more likely to predict that the characters in an ambiguous story would react to conflict aggressively than those who had played Glider Pro , 3D Pinball , Austin Powers , or Tetra Madness (non-violent games).
• 2004: Participants played a video game for 20 minutes and were given a word-completion task. Players who played Dark Forces , Marathon 2 , Speed Demon , Street Fighter , and Wolfenstein 3D (violent games) were more likely to predict that word fragments were part of aggressive words than non-aggressive words than those who had played 3D Ultra Pinball , Glider Pro , Indy Car II , Jewel Box , and Myst (non-violent games).
• 2004: Participants played a video game for 20 minutes and were given the Competitive Reaction Time Test. Those who played Marathon 2 (a violent game) turned the “noise punishment” dial to higher levels than those who had played Glider PRO (a non-violent game).
• 2014: Participants played a video game for 30 minutes and were given the hot sauce test. People who played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (a violent game) put more hot sauce into the cup than people who played LittleBigPlanet 2 (a non-violent game).

It is easy to conclude from this research that violent games make people more aggressive. In 2015, The American Psychiatric Association (APA) Task Force on Violent Media analyzed 31 similar studies published since 2009 and concluded that “violent video game use has an effect on... aggressive behavior, cognitions, and affect.”

Is this research valid?

However, experienced gamers would notice a critical problem with the studies’ construction.

Although Wolfenstein 3D , Call of Duty , and Duke Nukem are certainly more violent than Myst , LittleBigPlanet 2 , and Glider Pro , violence is far from the only variable.

For example, Wolfenstein 3D is an action-packed, exciting, and fast-paced shooting game, while Myst is a slow, methodical, exploration and puzzle game. To help illustrate this point, here is footage of people playing Wolfenstein and Myst .

Comparing the two and assuming that any differences in the level of aggression after playing must be due to the different levels of violence ignores all of these other variables.

If it’s not violence, what is it?

Some researchers have taken note of this criticism in recent years and begun exploring alternative hypotheses for the differences found, such as that the violent games chosen were also harder to master and that many people had aggressive thoughts simply because they lost . When they have conducted more nuanced studies to explore these other hypotheses, they have found that the violence was not the critical variable.

For example, one clever set of studies examined whether players acted out simply because some games “impeded competence.”

• The first study demonstrated that two of the games in the previous studies differed significantly in how difficult the games were to master; Glider Pro 4 uses just two buttons, while Marathon 2 requires the mouse plus 20 different buttons. This additional variable they identified makes it inappropriate to compare the two and draw a scientifically credible conclusion.
• The researchers then created two first-person-shooter games with differing levels of violence. In the violent game, characters who the players shot suffered horrific, bloody deaths. The other was a paintball game in which characters simply disappeared when shot. The two games were otherwise identical. When they tested the level of aggression afterward, they found no differences between the groups .
• In two other studies, these researchers manipulated the game Tetris to be more complicated for half of the participants, either by making the controls complicated or by giving them pieces that could not fit into the grid easily. The groups playing complicated, frustrating versions of the game showed more aggression afterward.

In each of these studies, it was the level of difficulty— not the presence of violence—that predicted aggressive thoughts and actions afterward. When the games were better matched than the previous studies, violence did not appear to affect aggression after playing.

In other words, these researchers concluded that games can make people angry just by being difficult to win.

A clear example of how frustration alone can lead to aggression in a non-violent game can be seen on YouTube, on well-known streamer Markiplier’s first attempt to beat Getting Over It . The game is bizarre; players try to guide a shirtless man in a cauldron up a mountain using only a hammer. It is designed to be extraordinarily unforgiving; one minor misstep might undo an hour of progress. Here ’s a video of him throwing a chair when he slipped down the mountain.

Others have suggested that it is the level of competition present in many games which fosters aggressive thoughts and actions. This is easy to understand—how many of us have yelled at friends or overturned the board at the end of a tense game of Monopoly? One gaming writer quipped , “What makes you angrier: dying to a horde of violent aliens in Gears of War , or losing a close match to your taunting brother in the very non-violent Mario Kart ?”

Anecdotally, I have found these two hypotheses to be true for my clients. I frequently hear from them or their parents that they act aggressively while playing video games, e.g. breaking controllers or yelling at their parents or other players. When I ask my clients about the situation, they talk about feeling frustrated, usually because of difficult gameplay, opponents playing unfairly, losing, or having to stop playing at an inopportune time in the game. These outbursts happen for violent and non-violent games alike.

What if violence is the variable?

In order to understand the results of the experiments, it is important to understand the difference between “statistical significance” and “clinical significance.” Statistical significance is a way to assess whether the results of the study were due to a real difference between groups or whether the results might have been due to chance. Clinical significance is whether the results are important for individuals or the population as a whole.

For example, the 2000 study which found that, on average, players turned the “punishment” dial longer when they played Wolfenstein 3D than those who had played Myst did reach statistical significance.

However, the actual difference was between 6.81 and 6.65 seconds, a difference of 0.16 seconds. To put that number into context, blinking takes roughly 0.1 to 0.4 seconds . That is, subjects who played violent and non-violent games both chose to punish an imaginary opponent for roughly seven seconds. The difference between how long the groups held the dial was less than the blink of an eye .

A 2 percent difference in how long someone holds a dial in a laboratory is hardly cause for alarm. Further, studies have shown that this tiny increase in aggression fades quickly, lasting less than 10 minutes .

Despite this, the researchers linked violent video games to the school shooting at Columbine High School in the first paragraph of the paper.

The APA’s Society for Media Psychology and Technology has since firmly stated that this kind of comparison is inappropriate : “Journalists and policymakers do their constituencies a disservice where they link acts of real-world violence with the perpetrators’ exposure to violent video games...there’s little scientific evidence to support the connection...Discovering that a young crime perpetrator also happened to play violent video games is no more illustrative than discovering that he or she happened to wear sneakers or used to watch Sesame Street.”

In fact, the Secret Service’s report studying characteristics of school shooters showed that only 14 percent of school shooters enjoyed violent video games , compared to 70 percent of their peers.

What about long-term effects?

Some researchers who study aggression use the General Aggression Model (GAM) , a unified theory of aggression created by the researcher who authored many of the papers that found a link between aggression and violent video games. The theory explains that many things may increase aggression in the short-term, including being insulted, unpleasant noises, and the temperature of the room.

The GAM theory further suggests that repeatedly acting on aggressive impulses may push people toward becoming permanently more aggressive. For example, a normally peaceful person may act out when insulted. The more times the person acts out, the more “accessible” violent responses become and the more likely this person is to act violently in future situations.

This makes intuitive sense, and researchers sometimes state that even a tiny increase in aggression, like the aforementioned 2 percent, could be cumulative and lead to long-term aggressive tendencies.

However, it does not appear that this is true. Researchers recently surveyed more than 1,000 British teens ages 14-15 on how often they play games, independently examined how violent those games are, and asked their parents to report how aggressively their children acted over the past month. They examined whether each variable was connected and found no evidence of a correlation. Teens who played violent games many hours per week did not act more aggressively than those who played peaceful games or no games at all.

Should children play violent games?

Of course, I am not suggesting that it is appropriate for young children to play violent games. I would not recommend that young children play Call of Duty for the same reason that I would not recommend they watch Saving Private Ryan until they are mature enough to understand it.

Even though it is not likely to make peaceful people aggressive, media which contains graphic violence can be frightening and hard to understand, especially for young people. Parents should take reasonable steps to ensure that their children are playing age-appropriate games, in the same way that they should ensure their children are watching age-appropriate movies.

Some parents choose to play video games with their children, ask them to play in a common area, or sit with them while they play to help provide context to the content of the games. These are great ideas; they allow parents to teach their children the difference between violence in games and in real life, to have conversations about the actions their characters take, and to comfort children who become scared.

It also helps parents understand what their children are experiencing while playing games so they can help them learn to manage these feelings of frustration. Parents who are familiar with their children’s video games can determine whether they are age-appropriate, their children’s motivations for play, how their children are affected, and how to set appropriate limits.

Adachi, P.J.C. & Willoughby, T. (2011). The effect of video game competition and violence on aggressive behavior: Which characteristic has the greatest influence? Psychology of Violence, 1 (4). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2cab/940f9292928a48d57c375259442c9dc7d…

Allen, J.J., Anderson, C.A., & Bushman, B.J. (2017). The General Aggression Model. Current Opinion in Psychology, 19 . Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316119742_The_General_Aggressi…

Anderson, C.A., Carnagey, N.L., & Eubanks, J. (2003). Exposure to violent media: The effects of songs with violent lyrics on aggressive thoughts and feelings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84 (5). Retrieved from http://www.craiganderson.org/wp-content/uploads/caa/abstracts/2000-2004…

Anderson, C.A. & Dill, K.E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (4). Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.583.6828&rep=r…

APA Task Force on Violent Media (2015). Technical report on the review of the violent video game literature. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/pi/families/review-video-games.pdf

Barlett, C., Branch, O., Rodeheffer, C., & Harris, R. (2009). How long do the short-term violent video game effects last? Aggressive Behavior, 35 . Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23996782_How_Long_Do_the_Short…

Breuer, J., Scharkow, M., & Quandt, T. (2013, December 23). Sore Losers? A Reexamination of the Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis for Colocated Video Game Play. Psychology of Popular Media Culture. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/ppm0000020 Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261794000_Sore_losers_A_reexam…

Bushman, B.J. & Anderson, C.A. (2002). Violent video games and hostile expectations: A test of the General Aggression Model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237308783_Violent_Video_Games_…

Chester, D.S. & Lasko, E. (2018). Validating a standardized approach to the Taylor Aggression Paradigm. Social Psychological and Personality Science. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325749887_Validating_a_Standar…

CNN. (2018, February 22). Trump blames video games, movies for violence [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RKZn2Sf7bo

Doommaster1994 [Doommaster1994]. (2008, November 13). Wolfenstein 3D Gameplay [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=561sPCk6ByE

Ferguson, C.J. (2008). The school shooting/violent video game link: Causal relationship or moral panic? Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 5. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/725227/The_school_shooting_violent_video_game_…

Ferguson, C. (2017, Spring/Summer). News Media, Public Education and Public Policy Committee: Societal violence and video games: Public statements of a link are problematic. The Amplifier Magazine . Retrieved from https://div46amplifier.com/2017/06/12/news-media-public-education-and-p…

Filardodesigns [filardodesigns]. (2008, September 8). MYST - Chapter 1 [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-8CFun3nEw

Fischbach, M.E. [Markiplier]. (2017, December 7). I LITERALLY THROW A CHAIR IN RAGE | Getting Over It - Part 1 [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/dH9w9VlyNO4

Hollingdale, J. & Greitemeyer, T. (2014). The effect of online violent video games on levels of aggression. PLoS ONE 9 (11). Retrieved from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.01117…

Jimmy Kimmel Live [Jimmy Kimmel Live]. (2018, December 13). YouTube Challenge - I Turned Off the TV During Fortnite [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AggZU8sg5HI

Lieberman, J.D., Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & McGregor, H.A. (1999). A hot new way to measure aggression: Hot sauce allocation. Aggressive Behavior, 25 . Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3a78/9895c3e18f9e3356e98feda68521b726f…

Milo, R., Jorgensen, P., Moran, U., Weber, G., & Springer, M. (2009). BioNumbers - the database of key numbers in molecular and cell biology. Nucleic Acids Research, 38 . Retrieved from https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?&id=100706&ver=4

Przybylski, A.K., Deci, E.L., Rigby, C.S., & Ryan, R.M. (2014). Competence-impeding electronic games and players’ aggressive feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106 (3). Retrieved from http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/2014_Przy…

Przybylski, A.K. & Weinstein, N. (2019). Violent video game engagement is not associated with adolescents’ aggressive behaviour: Evidence from a registered report. Royal Society Open Science, 6 (2). Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331409534_Violent_video_game_e…

Schreier, J. (2015, August 14). Why most video game “aggression” studies are nonsense. Retrieved from https://kotaku.com/why-most-video-game-aggression-studies-are-nonsense-…

Andrew Fishman is a licensed social worker in Chicago, Illinois. He is also a lifelong gamer who works with clients to understand the impact video games have had on their mental health.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

It’s increasingly common for someone to be diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD or autism as an adult. A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.

Christopher J. Ferguson, The Conversation Christopher J. Ferguson, The Conversation

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-why-its-time-to-stop-blaming-video-games-for-real-world-violence

Analysis: Why it’s time to stop blaming video games for real-world violence

In the wake of the El Paso shooting on Aug. 3 that left 21 dead and dozens injured, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games and other forms of media.

This time around, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick placed some of the blame on a video game industry that “ teaches young people to kill .” Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California went on to condemn video games that “dehumanize individuals” as a “problem for future generations.” And President Trump pointed to society’s “glorification of violence,” including “ gruesome and grisly video games .”

These are the same connections a Florida lawmaker made after the Parkland shooting in February 2018, suggesting that the gunman in that case “was prepared to pick off students like it’s a video game .”

Kevin McCarthy, the GOP House minority leader, also tells Fox News that video games are the problem following the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. pic.twitter.com/w7DmlJ9O1K — John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) August 4, 2019

But, speaking as a researcher who has studied violent video games for almost 15 years, I can state that there is no evidence to support these claims that violent media and real-world violence are connected. As far back as 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that research did not find a clear connection between violent video games and aggressive behavior.

Criminologists who study mass shootings specifically refer to those sorts of connections as a “ myth .” And in 2017, the Media Psychology and Technology division of the American Psychological Association released a statement I helped craft, suggesting reporters and policymakers cease linking mass shootings to violent media, given the lack of evidence for a link.

A history of a moral panic

So why are so many policymakers inclined to blame violent video games for violence? There are two main reasons.

The first is the psychological research community’s efforts to market itself as strictly scientific. This led to a replication crisis instead, with researchers often unable to repeat the results of their studies. Now, psychology researchers are reassessing their analyses of a wide range of issues – not just violent video games, but implicit racism , power poses and more.

The other part of the answer lies in the troubled history of violent video game research specifically.

An attendee dressed as a Fortnite character poses for a picture in a costume at Comic Con International in San Diego, California, U.S., July 19, 2019. Photo by REUTERS/Mike Blake

Beginning in the early 2000s, some scholars, anti-media advocates and professional groups like the APA began working to connect a methodologically messy and often contradictory set of results to public health concerns about violence. This echoed historical patterns of moral panic, such as 1950s concerns about comic books and Tipper Gore’s efforts to blame pop and rock music in the 1980s for violence, sex and satanism.

Particularly in the early 2000s, dubious evidence regarding violent video games was uncritically promoted . But over the years, confidence among scholars that violent video games influence aggression or violence has crumbled .

Reviewing all the scholarly literature

My own research has examined the degree to which violent video games can – or can’t – predict youth aggression and violence. In a 2015 meta-analysis , I examined 101 studies on the subject and found that violent video games had little impact on kids’ aggression, mood, helping behavior or grades.

Two years later, I found evidence that scholarly journals’ editorial biases had distorted the scientific record on violent video games. Experimental studies that found effects were more likely to be published than studies that had found none. This was consistent with others’ findings . As the Supreme Court noted, any impacts due to video games are nearly impossible to distinguish from the effects of other media, like cartoons and movies.

Any claims that there is consistent evidence that violent video games encourage aggression are simply false.

Spikes in violent video games’ popularity are well-known to correlate with substantial declines in youth violence – not increases. These correlations are very strong, stronger than most seen in behavioral research. More recent research suggests that the releases of highly popular violent video games are associated with immediate declines in violent crime, hinting that the releases may cause the drop-off.

The role of professional groups

With so little evidence, why are people like Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin still trying to blame violent video games for mass shootings by young men? Can groups like the National Rifle Association seriously blame imaginary guns for gun violence?

A key element of that problem is the willingness of professional guild organizations such as the APA to promote false beliefs about violent video games. (I’m a fellow of the APA.) These groups mainly exist to promote a profession among news media, the public and policymakers, influencing licensing and insurance laws . They also make it easier to get grants and newspaper headlines. Psychologists and psychology researchers like myself pay them yearly dues to increase the public profile of psychology. But there is a risk the general public may mistake promotional positions for objective science.

In 2005 the APA released its first policy statement linking violent video games to aggression. However, my recent analysis of internal APA documents with criminologist Allen Copenhaver found that the APA ignored inconsistencies and methodological problems in the research data.

The APA updated its statement in 2015, but that sparked controversy immediately: More than 230 scholars wrote to the group asking it to stop releasing policy statements altogether. I and others objected to perceived conflicts of interest and lack of transparency tainting the process.

It’s bad enough that these statements misrepresent the actual scholarly research and misinform the public. But it’s worse when those falsehoods give advocacy groups like the NRA cover to shift blame for violence onto non-issues like video games. The resulting misunderstanding hinders efforts to address mental illness and other issues, such as the need for gun control, that are actually related to gun violence.

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article . This story was updated from an earlier version to reflect the events surrounding the El Paso and Dayton shootings.

Christopher J. Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University. He's coauthor of " Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong ."

Support Provided By: Learn more

Educate your inbox

Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

Thank you. Please check your inbox to confirm.

El Paso shooting is domestic terrorism, investigators say

Nation Aug 04

Health Research 4 U

Safe To Play

Violent Video Games and Aggression

After mass shootings, the media and public officials often question the role of the shooter’s video game habits.

The American Psychological Association (APA) considers violent video games a risk factor for aggression . [1] In 2017, the APA Task Force on Violent Media concluded that violent video game exposure was linked to increased aggressive behaviors, thoughts, and emotions, as well as decreased empathy. However, it is not clear whether violent video game exposure was linked to criminality or delinquency.

Do Violent Video Games Increase Aggression?

Studies have shown that playing violent video games can increase aggressive thoughts, behaviors, and feelings in both the short-term and long-term. [2] Violent video games can also desensitize people to seeing aggressive behavior and decrease prosocial behaviors such as helping another person and feeling empathy (the ability to understand others). The longer that individuals are exposed to violent video games, the more likely they are to have aggressive behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. These effects have been seen in studies in both Eastern and Western countries. Although males spend more time than females playing violent video games, violent video game exposure can increase aggressive thoughts, behaviors, and feelings in both sexes.

Aggressive behavior is measured by scientists in a number of ways. Some studies looked at self-reports of hitting or pushing, and some looked at peer or teacher ratings on aggressive behaviors. Other studies looked at how likely an individual was to subject others to an unpleasant exposure to hot sauce or a loud noise after playing violent video games.

Unfortunately, few studies have been completed on violent video game exposure and aggression in children under age 10. There is also little information about the impact of violent video game exposure on minority children.

There have not been many studies on the effects of different characteristics of video games, such as perspective or plot. However, some studies have found that competition among players in video games is a better predictor of aggressive behavior than is the level of violence. [3] 

Do Violent Video Games Increase Violence?

Violence is a form of aggression, but not all aggressive behaviors are violent. Very few studies have looked at whether playing violent video games increases the chances of later delinquency, criminal behavior, or lethal violence. Such studies are difficult to conduct, and require very large numbers of children. It makes sense that since playing violent video games tends to increase the level of aggressive behavior it would also results in more lethal violence or other criminal behaviors, but there is no clear evidence to support that assumption.

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting in Florida in 2018, policymakers are again questioning the influence of violent video games. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) affirms that their rating system is effective, but the APA Task Force on Violent Media recommends that the ESRB revise their rating system to make the level of violence clearer. The Task Force also recommends that further research must be done using delinquency, violence, and criminal behavior as outcomes to determine whether or not violent video games are linked to violence.

Bottom Line

It is important to keep in mind that violent video game exposure is only one risk factor of aggressive behavior. For example, mental illness, adverse environments, and access to guns are all risk factors of aggression and violence.

All articles are reviewed and approved by  Dr. Diana Zuckerman and other senior staff.

The  National Center for Health Research  is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research, education and advocacy organization that analyzes and explains the latest medical research and speaks out on policies and programs. We do not accept funding from pharmaceutical companies or medical device manufacturers.  Find out how you can support us here .

References :

• The American Psychological Association Task Force on Violent Media. (2017). The American Psychological Association Task Force Assessment of Violent Video Games: Science in the Service of Public Interest. American Psychologist . 72(2): 126-143. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040413 . Accessed on March 9, 2018.
• Anderson CA, Shibuya A, Ihori N, Swing EL, Bushman BJ, Sakamoto A, Rothstein HR, Muniba. Violent Video Game Effects on Aggression, Empathy, and Prosocial Behavior in Eastern and Western Countries: A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin . 2010.
• Adachi, PJ and Willoughby, T. (2013). Demolishing the Competition: The Longitudinal Link Between Competitive Video Games, Competitive Gambling, and Aggression. Journal of Youth Adolescence. 42(7): 1090-104. doi: 10.1007/s10964-013-9952-2.
• Sanstock, JW. A Topical Approach to Life Span Development 4th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Ch 15. 489-491
• Lemmens JS, Valkenburg PM, Peter J. The Effects of Pathological Gaming on Aggressive Behavior. Journal of Youth Adolescence . 2010.
• Huesmann LR, Moise J, Podolski CP, Eron LD. (2003). Longitudinal relations between childhood exposure to media violence and adult aggression and violence. Developmental Psychology . 35:201-221.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Int J Environ Res Public Health

Violent Video Game Exposure and Problem Behaviors among Children and Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Deviant Peer Affiliation for Gender and Grade Differences

Associated data.

Data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Based on problem behavior theory, a mediation model for gender and grade differences is explored in this study. The study examined gender and grade differences in the effects of violent video games and deviant peer affiliation on problem behaviors among children and adolescents. A total of 2118 children and adolescents from four primary and middle schools in China (M age = 13.08, SD = 2.17) were surveyed using an anonymous questionnaire on basic information, exposure to violent video games, deviant peer affiliation, and problem behaviors. The results showed that exposure to violent video games significantly positively predicted problem behaviors, and deviant peer affiliation played a mediating role. Significant gender and grade differences were found in the mediating effect. This finding helps understand the individual differences in the influencing factors of problem behaviors. Further, it has important implications for interventions to reduce problem behaviors among children and adolescents.

1. Introduction

Problem behavior (PB) is one of the most prevalent and persistent forms of maladjustment among children and adolescents [ 1 ]. It refers to abnormal behaviors that occur in individuals that hinder their social adjustment, involving both their own emotional abnormalities and behaviors that negatively affect others and society [ 2 ]. Further, it can be divided into internalizing and externalizing problems. Research has shown that PBs among children and adolescents are often strongly associated with lower academic performance [ 3 ], substance addiction [ 4 ], adjustment difficulties [ 5 ], and even lead to delinquent behavior [ 6 ]. Moreover, this adverse effect often persists into adulthood [ 7 ]. Therefore, it is necessary to study the factors influencing children and adolescents’ PBs to reduce the occurrence of their PBs and promote the healthy development of primary and middle school students.

Problem behavior theory (PBT) suggests that PBs do not occur randomly among children and adolescents but result from a combination of risk and protective factors. Protective factors reduce the likelihood of PBs by providing prosocial behavior patterns and individual or social regulation of PBs. Contrastingly, risk factors increase the likelihood of PBs by providing PB patterns, greater exposure or involvement in PBs, and increased individual susceptibility to PBs [ 8 , 9 , 10 ].

Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the rapid development of the Internet, video games have been an important leisure and entertainment tool for children and adolescents. Violent video games, as a popular game genre, are vital for the development of children and adolescents. Based on PBT, violent video games serve as a virtual external environment that can influence the production and dissolution of PBs among children and adolescents. Scholars have investigated the effects of violent video games on children and adolescents. Through multiple meta-analyses, they established that violent video games significantly adversely affected aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, violent desensitization, and mental health [ 11 ]. Moreover, few studies have found that deviant peer affiliation (DPA) may mediate the relationship between risk factors and PBs. For example, Bao et al. (2015) found that school climate indirectly predicts juvenile criminal behavior through adverse peer interactions [ 12 ]. Sun and Sun (2021) suggested that peer influence may mediate the relationship between violent video games and PBs [ 13 ]. Violent video games and peers are critical environmental factors that affect children’s and adolescents’ PBs.

Notably, in addition to risk and protective factors, PBT emphasizes the possible differences in PB by gender and age [ 14 ]. Previous studies have found that boys have more PBs than girls [ 15 ], and adolescent PBs increase with age. Further, Moffitt (2003) argues that adolescent antisocial behavior peaks at approximately 17 years of age [ 16 ].

Through literature review, we found that research on how violent video games affect PBs is limited, with inadequate discussion of social context and participants who are middle school or college students. Simultaneously, fewer studies involve middle and elementary school students. Therefore, based on a literature review and PBT, this study investigated the effects of violent video game exposure (VVGE) on children and adolescents’ PBs, including the mediating effect of DPA, with Chinese middle and elementary school students as participants. Moreover, we focused on the differences in the relationship between VVGE, DPA, and PB among children and adolescents of different genders and grades.

1.1. Violent Video Game Exposure and Problem Behavior

Most studies show that violent video games significantly increase PB in players. Regarding violent content, some meta-analyses have found that violent video games increase players’ aggressive cognition, emotion, and behavior and decrease players’ empathy, which negatively impacts players’ social behavior [ 17 , 18 ]. Concerning game frequency, studies have found that long-term video game exposure has adverse effects on adolescents’ emotions and social relations and increases the risk of anxiety, mood disorders, and social adjustment difficulties [ 19 , 20 ]. Further, attention difficulties and hyperactivity disorder are significantly related to game exposure [ 21 ]. Some empirical studies have also shown that VVGE is associated substantially with PBs such as aggressive behavior [ 22 ] and emotional problems, including anxiety and depression [ 23 , 24 ], and even criminal behavior [ 25 ]. Based on the literature reviewed above, we propose the following hypothesis:

VVGE positively correlates with PBs among children and adolescents .

1.2. Deviant Peer Affiliation as a Mediator

DPA refers to associating with peers who violate school rules and regulations, social ethics, and legal behaviors [ 26 ]. Evidence shows that DPA is significantly associated with individual PBs [ 27 , 28 ]. The General Aggression Model is often used to explain and predict the paths and ways in which violent video games lead to increased aggression. Recent revisions to the General Aggression Model theory have highlighted the role of peer groups in the association between violent video games and their adverse effects [ 29 ]. This suggests that DPA may be an important mediating variable between VVGE and PBs among children and adolescents. As children and adolescents join the school and adopt it as their main life scene, they rely more on their peers (classmates). At this stage, children and adolescents have a strong need for a sense of belonging to the group, and peers are vital in the adolescent development stage, especially in the transition to middle school. According to the “interpersonal similarity principle”, children and adolescents seek peers with the same or similar behaviors to establish friendships based on their own characteristics. Children and adolescents who play violent games are more likely to choose peers with similar behavioral characteristics to develop friendships with them [ 30 ]. Studies have found that VVGE affects the social behavior of players and those associated with them, such as increased aggression by players and their peers [ 31 , 32 ]. Some studies on actual violence have also found that exposure to community violence may increase the likelihood of adolescents becoming friends with immoral peers [ 33 ]. To avoid deviating from the social context of peer norms or peer group roles, adolescents may conform to their peers’ interests, hobbies, and behaviors based on adverse peer pressure [ 34 ] and then develop more problematic behaviors.

Similarly, DPA also affects individual behavior; it is one of the common risk factors for externalization problems (EP) [ 35 ]. Studies have found that children or adolescents with aggressive friends are more likely to have social adjustment problems [ 30 ] and that DPA is also commonly associated with skipping class, smoking, violence, or aggression [ 36 , 37 ]. Regarding internalization problems (IP), some researchers believe that the quality of friendships adolescents establish in DPA is low, and the relationship between groups is chaotic. The effort and return between them is inadequate; therefore, it is difficult to obtain necessary emotional support, which is more likely to lead to IPs, such as emotional disorders [ 38 , 39 ]. Based on the literature reviewed above, we propose the following hypothesis:

Deviant peer affiliation significantly mediates the relationship between exposure to violent games and PBs among children and adolescents .

1.3. Gender and Grade Differences

Although gender and grade differences in PBs have been widely acknowledged and discussed, few studies explore the factors influencing PBs among children and adolescents of different genders and grades. Based on PBT, as external environmental factors, VVGE and DPA may have significant gender and grade differences in their relationship with PB.

First, concerning gender, previous studies have shown that boys indulge in violent video games more than girls do. They have a lower level of guilt when exposed to violent video games [ 40 ]. Most researchers also believe that boys are more likely to be influenced by immoral peers and that they have various internal and external problems [ 41 , 42 ]. However, some research results show that girls are more likely to be influenced by immoral peers in drinking behavior [ 43 ] and depression or anxiety [ 44 ]. Second, at grade level, studies have found that playing time decreases with age [ 45 ], and that game preferences change. The susceptibility or resistance of individuals to peer influence also presents different characteristics at various ages. For example, studies have found that the tendency of individual behavior to be susceptible to peer influence seems to appear in early adolescence and reaches its peak at approximately 14 years of age [ 46 ]. This study focuses on the mediating effect of adverse peer interactions between VVGE and problem behavior. Based on this, we propose the following hypothesis:

Significant gender and grade differences exist in the relationships between VVGE, DPA, and PBs among children and adolescents .

1.4. Research Purpose

In summary, this study intends to use Chinese middle and elementary schools as the research object and propose a mediating model ( Figure 1 ) to explore the mediating effect on the relationship between VVGE and PBs among children and adolescents. Based on PBT, the differences in gender and grade were investigated.

Hypothesized model of violent video games affecting problem behavior.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. participants.

This study used the cluster sampling method to randomly select 2191 students from the fourth grade of elementary school to the first grade of senior high school from four elementary and secondary schools in a city in southwest China. The questionnaire was screened according to the principles, whether the answer was complete, whether there was a regular answer, and whether there was a contradiction. After screening questionnaires, 2118 valid questionnaires were obtained, with an effective rate of 96.67%. The participants were aged between 9 and 17 years, with an average age of 13.08 ± 2.17 years.

Monte Carlo power analysis for indirect effects was adopted. Based on the effect sizes of previous research [ 47 , 48 ], the effects size was set for a (r = 0.10), b (r externalization problem = 0.20, r internalization problem = 0.10), and c (r externalization problem = 0.20, r internalization problem = 0.10) path. Consequently, recruiting a total of 1100 (externalization problem) and 1300 (internalization problem) participants would lead to the power of 90 percent for the indirect effects (i.e., a · b) at the p < 0.05 level with 20,000 Monte Carlo replications. Thus, the sample recruited for this study (n = 2118) was more than sufficient to provide adequate statistical power (>95 percent) to detect small indirect effects.

2.2. Measures

2.2.1. violent video game exposure questionnaire.

This questionnaire was compiled by [ 49 ] and revised by Chinese scholars, and is widely used [ 50 , 51 ]. It asked the participants to list three violent video games they had most recently encountered and to rate the frequency and violence of each game. Using a 5-point score, the degree of exposure to violent video games = amount of exposure = ∑ [violent content × frequency of using games]/3; the higher the score, the more exposure to violent video games. The violent video game exposure questionnaire has been shown to be both reliable and valid [ 52 ]. In this study, Cronbach’s α was 0.87.

2.2.2. Deviant Peer Affiliation Questionnaire

The deviant peer affiliation questionnaire [ 53 , 54 ] contained eight questions that involved destructive behaviors, such as smoking, drinking, theft, Internet addiction, truancy, or misbehavior. A 5-point score from 1 “none” to 5 “all” indicated the number of friends who showed one of the eight destructive behaviors in the recent year. Considering the average score, the higher the score, the more undesirable the peer behavior. The questionnaire has been shown to be reliable and valid [ 55 , 56 ]. In this study, Cronbach’s α was 0.78.

2.2.3. Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (Student Version)

This scale was developed by Goodman R. [ 57 , 58 ] and revised by Du [ 59 ]. The scale comprises five factors; because this study focused on PBs, the difficult part of the questionnaire was used. This comprised four factors: emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity and attention disorders, and peer relationships, and was divided into internalization (emotional symptoms, peer relationships) and externalization problems (conduct problems, hyperactivity, and attention disorders) using Goodman’s suggestion. A “0–2” scale was used, ranging from “does not meet” to “fully meets”. In previous studies, this questionnaire showed good reliability [ 60 , 61 ]. In this study, Cronbach’s α coefficient for the difficult part of the questionnaire was 0.76.

2.3. Procedure and Data Analysis

Participants voluntarily completed the questionnaire survey while at school during a specified class period lasting 20 min. SPSS 26.0 was applied to obtain descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, and difference test. Data may be missing on some variables because participants left an answer blank for 0.28% to 0.94% of the items across the total sample. We used participants’ average scores to replace such information. Then, Amos 24 was applied to test the mediating effect of deviant peer affiliation using the structural equation model, and the differences in gender and grade in the mediating effect of deviant peer affiliation utilizing the method of group analysis.

2.4. Common Method Deviation

In this study, variable data collection adopted a self-report method. Based on Zhou and Long’s (2004) suggestion, the Harman single-factor test was adopted to test the common method deviation [ 62 ]. The results showed nine factors with eigenvalues > 1, and the variance explained by the first principal factor was 17.35%, which was less than the critical standard of 40%. It can be concluded that there were no common methodological deviations in this study.

3.1. Descriptive Statistics

Table 1 contains the basic information on all subjects. Table 2 contains the correlation, mean, and standard deviation for study variables. Table 3 contains the differences in the research variables in gender and grade.

Basic information.

Correlation.

Note: ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

Difference test.

Note: * p < 0.05, *** p < 0.001.

The results in Table 2 show that there is a significant positive correlation between VVGE and IP and EP, indicating that the more VVGE, the higher the IPs and EPs levels among children and adolescents. Further, there is a significant positive correlation between VVGE and DPA, indicating that the more VVGE, the more DPA among children and adolescents. DPA positively correlates with the IP and EP of children and adolescents, indicating that the more DPA children and adolescents have, the higher their IPs and EPs levels are.

Difference test showed significant differences in VVGE and DPA by gender and grade level—boys had higher levels of VVGE and DPA than girls did. There were substantial differences in IP by gender and non-significant differences by grade level, and girls had higher levels of IPs than boys did. Significant differences existed in EP by grade level and non-significant differences by gender. Children and adolescents in higher grades had more EPs ( Table 3 ).

3.2. Mediating Effect of Deviant Peer Affiliation between Violent Video Game Exposure and Problem Behaviors

A structural equation model was constructed using Amos24 to examine the mediating effect of DPA between VVGE and PB. According to the different test results, gender and grade were included in the mediation effect test as control variables.

Based on the mediation effect test process suggested by [ 63 ], an unmediated model with VVGE as the independent variable and IP and EP as the dependent variables is constructed. The results showed that the unmediated model fit well (χ 2 / df = 11.15, RMSEA = 0.07, CFI = 0.96, TLI = 0.93, GFI = 0.98, IFI = 0.96, SRMR = 0.04), and VVGE positively predicted IPs ( β = 0.15, p < 0.001) and EPs ( β = 0.24, p < 0.001).

A mediating model was constructed using DPA as the mediating variable. The results showed that the mediation model fit well (χ 2 / df = 10.33, RMSEA = 0.07, CFI = 0.95, TLI = 0.92, GFI = 0.97, IFI = 0.95, and SRMR = 0.05). The test results for each coefficient showed that VVGE significantly positively predicted DPA ( β = 0.24, p < 0.001), and DPA significantly positively predicted IP. After adding DPA as a mediating variable, the predictive effect of VVGE on IP weakened ( β = 0.10, p < 0.001). DPA positively predicted EP ( β = 0.38, p < 0.001), while the predictive effect of VVGE on EP was weakened ( β = 0.17, p < 0.001), indicating that DPA partially mediated the relationship between VVGE and IP and EP. Bootstrap (sampling times: 5000) was used further to test DPA’s mediating effect ( Table 4 ). The results showed that the mediating effect of DPA between VVGE and IP was 0.06, and 0.09 between VVGE and EP.

Breakdown table of the total effect, direct effect, and mediating effect.

3.3. Cross-Group Comparison of Mediating Effects of Deviant Peer Affiliation between Violent Game Exposure and Problem Behavior

3.3.1. gender difference analysis.

A structural equation model was used to investigate gender differences in the mediating effect of DPA between VVGE and PB, and the model included grade as a control variable. First, a model test was conducted on male and female students, and the results showed that the model fit was good in the two samples, which could be compared across groups ( Table 5 ). Next, the unconstrained Model M 0 was constructed on this basis (the male and female students had the same shape, and the path coefficient was freely estimated). The measurement weights Model M 1 was constructed based on model M 0 (the factor loading of latent variables in the two groups of models was restricted to remain unchanged across the groups). The two models fit well. The model comparison showed a significant difference between M 0 and M 1 [Δχ 2 = 20.55, p < 0.001], indicating that the model measurement coefficients of the male and female groups had cross-group inequalities. Further tests found cross-group differences in the loading coefficients of factors 1 and 2 on VVGE and the loading coefficients of peer barriers on IP. Therefore, the above coefficients were freely estimated to establish Model M 2 with equal measurement weights across groups. Finally, the structural weights Model M 3 is constructed based on M 2 (the path coefficients in the two groups of models are restricted to remain unchanged across groups). The results showed that both M 2 and M 3 models fit well, and the model comparison revealed a significant difference between M 2 and M 3 [Δχ 2 = 57.14, p < 0.001]. Further tests revealed that the path coefficients of DPA on IP and EP differed across the groups ( Table 5 , Figure 2 ). The predictive effect of DPA on IP in boys ( β = 0.31, p < 0.001) was significantly higher than that in girls ( β = 0.28, p < 0.001). However, the predictive effect of DPA on EP was significantly lower in boys ( β = 0.37, p < 0.001) than in girls ( β = 0.41, p < 0.001).

Gender differences in mediating role of deviant peer affiliation. Note: The path coefficient is male outside the brackets and female inside the brackets; the load coefficient between each latent variable and its index, the residual error and error of all variables, and the control variable coefficient are omitted to simplify the model. * p < 0.05, *** p < 0.001.

Fitting index of multi-cohort model for multi-cohort analysis of gender difference.

Note: M male and M female were male and female models.

3.3.2. Grade Difference Test

This study investigated the grade difference of the mediating role of DPA in VVGE and PB used for the cross-group comparison of the structural equation model and considered gender as a control variable in the model. The participants were divided into elementary school, junior high school, and senior high school according to their grades, and the grade differences in the intermediary model were investigated. First, the samples were divided into school sections for the model test. The results showed that the models of the three samples fit well and could be compared across groups ( Table 6 ). Next, the unconstrained model M 4 (three groups of models have the same shape, and the path coefficient can be estimated freely) was built. Further, the measurement coefficient Model M 5 (limiting the factor load of latent variables in three groups of models to be constant across groups) was built. Both models fit well, and the comparison of the models showed a significant difference between Models M 4 and M 5 [Δχ 2 = 45.66, p < 0.001], indicating that the measurement coefficients of the three groups of models were unequal across groups. Further tests showed cross-group differences in the load coefficient of factor 1 and factor 2 on VVGE, the load coefficient of factor 2 on DPA, and the load coefficient of peer obstacles on IP. Therefore, the above coefficients were estimated freely, and Model M 6 with equal measurement weights s across groups was established. Finally, a structural weights Model M 7 was built based on M 6 (the path coefficient among the three models is limited to be unchanged across groups). The results showed that the M 6 and M 7 models fit well, and the comparison indicated that M 6 and M 7 had significant differences [Δχ 2 = 110.07, p < 0.001]. Further examination showed that cross-group differences existed between the path coefficients of DPA on IP and EP and VVGE on EP ( Table 6 , Figure 3 ). For instance, the predictive effect of DPA on IP was significantly higher at the elementary school level ( β = 0.39, p < 0.001) than at the senior high school level ( β = 0.31, p < 0.001), and significantly higher at the senior high school level than at the junior high school level ( β = 0.22, p < 0.001). Further, the predictive effect of DPA on EP was significantly higher at the elementary level ( β = 0.41, p < 0.001) than at the junior high school level ( β = 0.33, p < 0.001), but considerably lower than that at the senior high school level ( β = 0.47, p < 0.001). The direct effect of VVGE on EP was significantly lower at the senior high school level ( β = 0.06, p = 0.217) than at the elementary school level ( β = 0.21, p < 0.001) and junior high school ( β = 0.24, p < 0.001).

Grade differences in mediating role of deviant peer affiliation. Note: Path coefficients outside parentheses are for elementary school, inside parentheses are for junior high school, and inside square brackets are for senior high school. The load coefficient between each latent variable and its index, the residual error and error of all variables, and the control variable coefficient are omitted to simplify the model. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

Fitting index of multi-cohort model for multi-cohort analysis of grade difference.

Note: M elementary school , M junior high school , and M senior high school are models with different school sections.

4. Discussion

Childhood and adolescence are crucial periods of rapid individual development and tremendous change. This study was conducted with elementary, junior high, and senior high school students, focusing on the mechanisms of VVGE and DPA on PBs of children and adolescents and examining the differences by gender and grade.

First, the findings showed that VVGE positively and significantly predicted PB in children and adolescents, validating Research Hypothesis 1, which is consistent with previous research [ 19 , 20 , 21 ]. Regarding IPs, Kuss and Griffiths (2012) argue that the emergence of IPs may result from escapism and that players are attracted to games to escape from real-world problems [ 64 ]. Nonetheless, too much exposure is unhelpful and may exacerbate players’ emotional problems, such as anxiety and depression. Concerning EPs, violent video games are often fast-paced and offer frequent rewards or novel and enjoyable stimuli, which may contribute to the attention problems of child/adolescent players. According to the social learning theory, individuals can acquire undesirable behaviors in two ways: first, through observational learning, in which individuals receive unwanted behaviors by observing or imitating others’ undesirable behaviors. The other way is direct learning, in which individuals acquire undesirable behaviors through personal participation. During the game, child and adolescent players can develop unwanted behaviors by observing and imitating game non-player characters or directly manipulating game characters, which may lead to more EPs being exhibited by children and adolescents in real life.

Second, DPA mediated the relationship between VVGE and IP and EP, validating research Hypothesis 2 that VVGE affects PB by increasing children’s adolescents’ DPA. Games have a significant impact on children’s and adolescents’ peer interaction as a way of maintaining friendship. According to social network theory [ 65 ], individuals who are chronically exposed to violent games may be increasingly exposed to undesirable peers through a process of “selection”. The “selection” process refers to children and adolescents actively choosing peers with similar behaviors as their peers. Children and adolescents chronically exposed to violent video games tend to have more IPs or EPs. They may voluntarily join peers identical to them through a selection process based on similarity. The influence of undesirable peers on children and adolescents’ PB results from the interaction between children and adolescents and undesirable peers. This interaction is two-way, including the “socialization” process and the “selection” process. The process of “socialization” refers to children and adolescents making friends with peers who exhibit PB; they may develop similar behaviors under the influence of peer pressure and other factors. These two processes interact; children and adolescents who play games select peers with behavioral problems, and interactions with undesirable peers increase their own problem behaviors [ 66 ]. Simultaneously, friendships with undesirable peers tend to be unstable, and interactions with them tend to increase traditional peer rejection, which also increases the risk of IPs and EPs in children and adolescents.

Finally, the study’s results found that the effects of DPA on IP and EP showed significant gender and grade differences, partially validating research Hypothesis 3. Regarding gender, boys’ IPs were more likely to be influenced by DPA. Generally, boys are less flexible and lack cognitive and emotional coping skills and regulation when dealing with interpersonal relationships than girls [ 34 ], which may lead to more psychological distress in boys when dealing with DPA. Girls’ EPs are more likely to be influenced by DPA. On the one hand, girls are typically more precocious than boys. They are more likely to be exposed to older mixed-sex groups. Further, adolescent girls are more sensitive to social appraisal concerns and more dependent on intimate relationships as a source of self-evaluation and self-worth [ 67 ]. A qualitative study found that college girls’ drinking behavior is more often driven by pressure to impress their male peers [ 68 ], suggesting that girls are more likely to engage in more EPs out of the need for approval and influence from undesirable peers. On the other hand, boys have a greater tendency toward EPs than girls, and their EPs are more likely to be influenced by a combination of other factors, such as hormones and personality [ 69 ]. Concerning grade differences, elementary school students’ IPs were affected more by DPA. Early adolescence is a critical transition period for individual development, during which essential changes in the individual are often accompanied by changes in the social environment. Simultaneously, individuals become more independent in the face of their parents, where dependence on parents is replaced by reliance on peers, and they are more susceptible to peer influence [ 70 , 71 ]. Additionally, children in elementary school tend to show a one-off imbalance in their psychological development due to their young age. Simultaneously, they have low self-centeredness and self-control; they are more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to develop IPs. The EPs of senior high school students are affected more by DPA. It has been found that undesirable peer influences play an important role in developing PB in middle and late adolescence [ 27 ]. In senior high school, peer interaction has become an important way for senior high school students to meet their social needs and plays an important role in learning and life. Simultaneously, the character and hobbies of peers are gradually becoming essential criteria for choosing friends, and individuals who interact with undesirable peers often tend to misbehave. Aggression and popularity are often intertwined during interactions with undesirable peers [ 72 ]. Therefore, senior high school students in unwanted peer groups may adopt destructive behaviors to maintain friendships.

This study is an effort to explore the role of DPA between VVGE and PB, as well as gender and grade differences in a large sample (more than 2000 people), covering children and adolescents from different grades in elementary school, junior high school, and senior high school. In the term of theoretical aspect, this study explores the role of social factors in the relationship between VVGE and children and adolescents’ PBs and made clear the differences in both gender and grade, which deepens our understanding of the impact of VVGE on children and adolescents’ PBs and helps to explain its potential impact mechanism. In practice, this can also bring some thinking for the education of children and adolescents. As one of the common entertainment tools for children and adolescents, violent video games have a certain negative impact on children and adolescents’ social interaction and PBs. At the same time, the DPA of children and adolescents significantly affects their IPs and EPs. Therefore, in terms of family, parents should supervise children’s network use, cultivate children’s healthy network use habits, and avoid excessive addiction to video games. At the same time, they should also pay attention to children’s social interaction, guide children to establish healthy and positive peer groups, and reduce communication with bad peers. In school, first of all, teachers and mental health experts should pay attention to network security, to educate and guide children and adolescents to correctly understand the violent factors in video games. Secondly, we should pay attention to the harm of students’ bad companions and help students to establish a healthy and positive circle of friends. In addition, parents and schools should pay attention to the differences among primary, middle, and high school students in educating and guiding children and adolescents. In the social aspect, we can create a healthy network environment for children and adolescents by improving the game classification system and combating the illegal dissemination of harmful information.

Although the current study yielded important and practical findings on the targeted intervention and guidance, several limitations should be noted. First, this study is a cross-sectional study, which is not plausible to make a causal inference. In the future, longitudinal studies can be applied to clarify the causal relationship between variables. Second, all variables in the study are self-reported and may be affected by common method bias. Therefore, a more comprehensive data collection method should be adopted. Thirdly, video games are one of the common entertainment tools for children and adolescents and are regarded as an important factor affecting the psychosocial development of children and adolescents. This study only focuses on the impact of VVGE on children and adolescents’ PBs. Future research can further discuss the differences between different video game content. Finally, future researchers should consider more potential impact factors. In this study, we found that there are significant gender and age differences in the mediating role of DPA between violent video game exposure and problem behaviors, and the development of peer relationships in children and adolescents is affected by the individual growth environment (such as parent–child relationship, school atmosphere) [ 12 , 73 ]. Therefore, examining environmental factors such as family and school helps us understand the role of deviant peer affiliation.

5. Conclusions

In sum, this study found that VVGE can affect the social interaction of children and adolescents, thereby increasing their PBs, and this effect has gender and age differences. In terms of gender, although boys generally show more EPs in their daily lives, their IPs are more susceptible to peer influence, while girls are the opposite. In terms of age, the influence of peers presents different characteristics in different age groups. The IP of primary school students is more susceptible to DPA, while the EP of high school students is more susceptible to DPA.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the students who participated in this study. The authors would like to thank all the researchers who helped with data collection.

Funding Statement

This work was supported by the Chongqing Federation of Social Science [grant numbers 2020SZ29].

Author Contributions

Conceptualization M.W., Y.L. and S.C.; data curation, M.W., Y.L. and S.C.; formal analysis, M.W. and S.C.; funding acquisition, Y.L.; investigation, M.W., Y.L. and S.C.; methodology, M.W., Y.L. and S.C.; project administration, Y.L.; resources, Y.L.; supervision, Y.L.; writing—original draft preparation, M.W.; writing—review and editing, M.W. and Y.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved Research Project Ethical Review Application Form, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University of China (H22074, 4 July 2022).

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects and their parents involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Why We Need to Return to the Question of the Effects of Violent Video Games

June 28, 2024

Troubling social phenomena—such as a spike in mass shootings —stem from a multitude of interrelated factors. Reality is complicated; humans are complicated. But in an effort to condense findings for a general audience, make headlines, or both, the scientific community sometimes issues authoritative-sounding statements that muddle, rather than clarify, public understanding. This is the case with potential links between video games and violence.

In 2020, the American Psychological Association (APA) released a statement declaring, “There is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior.” The statement is reasonable when read carefully, with particular attention to the phrase “insufficient scientific evidence.” But mainstream news outlets and even some researchers and medical professionals have interpreted the statement as saying that there is no causal relationship between video games and violence. This is an incorrect interpretation because it adds certainty to the statement that is not actually there. Instead, the takeaway should be that it is unclear based on experimental research whether, or to what extent, violent games facilitate offline violence. As then-APA President Sandra L. Shullman highlighted in 2020, “Violence is a complex social problem that likely stems from many factors that warrant attention from researchers, policymakers and the public.” Still, one of these many factors could be participation in violent-themed video games, especially those in which racist and other hate-based rhetoric is endemic.

Research on multiplayer online games indicates that extremist statements and hate-based harassment are prevalent in many gaming communities. In a representative survey commissioned by our Center, 51% of multiplayer gamers reported that they had come across extremist narratives—statements like, “violence against women is justified” and “a particular ethnicity should be eliminated”—while playing multiplayer games during the previous year. Other researchers have suggested that the sustained prevalence of extremism in games has led to its normalization . Moreover, a pattern of real-world incidents involving mass shootings by young men who were also devoted gamers—and who used gaming aesthetics in their “ gamified ” acts of violence—suggests that, in some cases, participation in gaming communities contributes to radicalization. These findings and real-world observations ought to figure in the conversation about video games and violence.

The point is not to revive a moral panic around video games. The vast majority of the billions of people worldwide who play online games do not engage in mass violence. Moreover, given how widespread gaming is among young people—around 70% of US children under 18 play video games regularly—there is a high probability that the few young people committing violence would also be gamers.

The problem is also not with the medium itself. Video games come in many varieties, and some are designed to increase empathy and positive social behavior. The issue is that certain popular video games—and the communities surrounding them—have helped to normalize racist, misogynist, and other hate-based ideologies among gamers. Participation in such toxic online environments, when combined with preexisting vulnerabilities and access to firearms, can lead to offline violence. It is not a simple causal story but one that deserves careful examination and nuanced reporting.

French Authorities’ Detention of Telegram CEO: Long Overdue Accountability or Dangerous Precedent?

Scrutinizing Telegram’s Defense Amid UK Riots

KOSA is Good Tech Policy, but the House Has an Opportunity to Make it Even Better

Politics in Messaging Apps: Preliminary Results from a Multinational Survey

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The relation of violent video games to adolescent aggression: an examination of moderated mediation effect.

• 1 Research Institute of Moral Education, College of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
• 2 The Lab of Mental Health and Social Adaptation, Faculty of Psychology, Research Center for Mental Health Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

To assess the moderated mediation effect of normative beliefs about aggression and family environment on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, the subjects self-reported their exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggressive behavior. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression had a mediation effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while family environment moderated the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with a good family environment, exposure to violent video games had only a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, it had both direct and indirect effects mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. This moderated mediation model includes some notions of General Aggression Model (GAM) and Catalyst Model (CM), which helps shed light on the complex mechanism of violent video games influencing adolescent aggression.

Introduction

Violent video games and aggression.

The relationship between violent video games and adolescent aggression has become a hot issue in psychological research ( Wiegman and Schie, 1998 ; Anderson and Bushman, 2001 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; Ferguson et al., 2012 ; Greitemeyer, 2014 ; Yang et al., 2014 ; Boxer et al., 2015 ). Based on the General Aggression Model (GAM), Anderson et al. suggested that violent video games constitute an antecedent variable of aggressive behavior, i.e., the degree of exposure to violent video games directly leads to an increase of aggression ( Anderson and Bushman, 2001 ; Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson, 2004 ; Anderson et al., 2004 ). Related longitudinal studies ( Anderson et al., 2008 ), meta-analyses ( Anderson et al., 2010 ; Greitemeyer and Mugge, 2014 ), event-related potential studies ( Bailey et al., 2011 ; Liu et al., 2015 ), and trials about juvenile delinquents ( DeLisi et al., 2013 ) showed that exposure to violent video games significantly predicts adolescent aggression.

Although Anderson et al. insisted on using the GAM to explain the effect of violent video games on aggression, other researchers have proposed alternative points of view. For example, a meta-analysis by Sherry (2001) suggested that violent video games have minor influence on adolescent aggression. Meanwhile, Ferguson (2007) proposed that publication bias (or file drawer effect) may have implications in the effect of violent video games on adolescent aggression. Publication bias means that compared with articles with negative results, those presenting positive results (such as statistical significance) are more likely to be published ( Rosenthal and Rosnow, 1991 ). A meta-analysis by Ferguson (2007) found that after publication bias adjustment, the related studies cannot support the hypothesis that violent video games are highly correlated with aggression. Then, Ferguson et al. proposed a Catalyst Model (CM), which is opposite to the GAM. According to this model, genetic predisposition can lead to an aggressive child temperament and aggressive adult personality. Individuals who have an aggressive temperament or an aggressive personality are more likely to produce violent behavior during times of environmental strain. Environmental factors act as catalysts for violent acts for an individual who have a violence-prone personality. This means that although the environment does not cause violent behavior, but it can moderate the causal influence of biology on violence. The CM model suggested that exposure to violent video games is not an antecedent variable of aggressive behavior, but only acts as a catalyst influencing its form ( Ferguson et al., 2008 ). Much of studies ( Ferguson et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Ferguson, 2013 , 2015 ; Furuya-Kanamori and Doi, 2016 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ) found that adolescent aggression cannot be predicted by the exposure to violent video games, but it is closely related to antisocial personality traits, peer influence, and family violence.

Anderson and his collaborators ( Groves et al., 2014 ; Kepes et al., 2017 ) suggested there were major methodological shortcomings in the studies of Ferguson et al. and redeclared the validity of their own researches. Some researchers supported Anderson et al. and criticized Ferguson’s view ( Gentile, 2015 ; Rothstein and Bushman, 2015 ). However, Markey (2015) held a neutral position that extreme views should not be taken in the relationship between violent video games and aggression.

In fact, the relation of violent video games to aggression is complicated. Besides the controversy between the above two models about whether there is an influence, other studies explored the role of internal factors such as normative belief about aggression and external factors such as family environment in the relationship between violent video games and aggression.

Normative Beliefs About Aggression, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Normative beliefs about aggression are one of the most important cognitive factors influencing adolescent aggression; they refer to an assessment of aggression acceptability by an individual ( Huesmann and Guerra, 1997 ). They can be divided into two types: general beliefs and retaliatory beliefs. The former means a general view about aggression, while the latter reflects aggressive beliefs in provocative situations. Normative beliefs about aggression reflect the degree acceptance of aggression, which affects the choice of aggressive behavior.

Studies found that normative beliefs about aggression are directly related to aggression. First, self-reported aggression is significantly correlated to normative beliefs about aggression ( Bailey and Ostrov, 2008 ; Li et al., 2015 ). General normative beliefs about aggression can predict young people’s physical, verbal, and indirect aggression ( Lim and Ang, 2009 ); retaliatory normative beliefs about aggression can anticipate adolescent retaliation behavior after 1 year ( Werner and Hill, 2010 ; Krahe and Busching, 2014 ). There is a longitudinal temporal association of normative beliefs about aggression with aggression ( Krahe and Busching, 2014 ). Normative beliefs about aggression are significantly positively related to online aggressive behavior ( Wright and Li, 2013 ), which is the most important determining factor of adolescent cyberbullying ( Kowalski et al., 2014 ). Teenagers with high normative beliefs about aggression are more likely to become bullies and victims of traditional bullying and cyberbullying ( Burton et al., 2013 ). Finally, normative beliefs about aggression can significantly predict the support and reinforcement of bystanders in offline bullying and cyberbullying ( Machackova and Pfetsch, 2016 ).

According to Bandura’s social cognitive theory ( Bandura, 1989 ), violent video games can initiate adolescents’ observational learning. In this situation, not only can they imitate the aggressive behavior of the model but also their understanding and acceptability about aggression may change. Therefore, normative beliefs about aggression can also be a mediator between violent video games and adolescent aggression ( Duan et al., 2014 ; Anderson et al., 2017 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ). Studies have shown that the mediating role of normative beliefs about aggression is not influenced by factors such as gender, prior aggression, and parental monitoring ( Gentile et al., 2014 ).

Family Environment, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Family violence, parenting style, and other family factors have major effects on adolescent aggression. On the one hand, family environment can influence directly on aggression by shaping adolescents’ cognition and setting up behavioral models. Many studies have found that family violence and other negative factors are positively related to adolescent aggression ( Ferguson et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Ferguson, 2013 ), while active family environment can reduce the aggressive behavior ( Batanova and Loukas, 2014 ).

On the other hand, family environment can act on adolescent aggression together with other factors, such as exposure to violent video games. Analysis of the interaction between family conflict and media violence (including violence on TV and in video games) to adolescent aggression showed that teenagers living in higher conflict families with more media violence exposure show more aggressive behavior ( Fikkers et al., 2013 ). Parental monitoring is significantly correlated with reduced media violence exposure and a reduction in aggressive behavior 6 months later ( Gentile et al., 2014 ). Parental mediation can moderate the relationship between media violence exposure and normative beliefs about aggression, i.e., for children with less parental mediation, predictability of violent media exposure on normative beliefs about aggression is stronger ( Linder and Werner, 2012 ). Parental mediation is closely linked to decreased aggression caused by violent media ( Nathanson, 1999 ; Rasmussen, 2014 ; Padilla-Walker et al., 2016 ). Further studies have shown that the autonomy-supportive restrictive mediation of parents is related to a reduction in current aggressive behavior by decreasing media violence exposure; conversely, inconsistent restrictive mediation is associated with an increase of current aggressive behavior by enhancing media violence exposure ( Fikkers et al., 2017 ).

The Current Study

Despite GAM and CM hold opposite views on the relationship between violent video games and aggression, both of the two models imply the same idea that aggression cannot be separated from internal and external factors. While emphasizing on negative effects of violent video games on adolescents’ behavior, the GAM uses internal factors to explain the influencing mechanism, including aggressive beliefs, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggressive personality ( Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson and Carnagey, 2014 ). Although the CM considers that there is no significant relation between violent video games and aggression, it also acknowledges the role of external factors such as violent video games and family violence. Thus, these two models seem to be contradictory, but in fact, they reveal the mechanism of aggression from different points of view. It will be more helpful to explore the effect of violent video games on aggression from the perspective of combination of internal and external factors.

Although previous studies have investigated the roles of normative beliefs about aggression and family factors in the relationship between violent video games and adolescent aggression separately, the combined effect of these two factors remains unstudied. The purpose of this study was to analyze the combined effect of normative beliefs about aggression and family environment. This can not only confirm the effects of violent video games on adolescent aggression further but also can clarify the influencing mechanism from the integration of GAM and CM to a certain extent. Based on the above, the following three hypotheses were proposed:

Hypothesis 1: There is a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression.

Hypothesis 2: Normative beliefs about aggression are the mediator of exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression.

Hypothesis 3: The family environment can moderate the mediation effects of normative beliefs about aggression in exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression constitute a moderated mediation model.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

All subjects gave informed written consent for participation in this investigation, and their parents signed parental written informed consent. The study was reviewed and approved by the Professor Committee of School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, which is the committee responsible for providing ethics approvals. A total of 648 Chinese middle school students participated in this study, including 339 boys and 309 girls; 419 students were from cities and towns, and 229 from the countryside. There were 277 and 371 junior and high school students, respectively. Ages ranged from 12 to 19 years, averaging 14.73 ( SD  = 1.60).

Video Game Questionnaire (VGQ)

The Video Game Questionnaire ( Anderson and Dill, 2000) required participants to list their favorite five video games and assess their use frequencies, the degree of violent content, and the degree of violent images on a 7-point scale (1, participants seldom play video games, with no violent content or image; 7, participants often play video games with many violent contents and images). Methods for calculating the score of exposure to violent video games: (score of violent content in the game + score of violent images in the game) × use frequency/5. Chen et al. (2012) found that the Chinese version of this questionnaire had high internal consistency reliability and good content validity. The Chinese version was used in this study, and the Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.88.

Aggression Questionnaire (AQ)

There were 29 items in AQ ( Buss and Perry, 1992 ), including four dimensions: physical aggression, verbal aggression, anger, and hostility. The scale used 5-point scoring criteria (1, very incongruent with my features; 5, very congruent with my features). Scores for each item were added to obtain the dimension score, and dimension scores were summed to obtain the total score. The Chinese version of AQ had good internal consistency reliability and construct validity ( Ying and Dai, 2008 ). In this study, the Chinese version was used and its Cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.83.

Family Environment Scale (FES)

The FES ( Moos, 1990 ) includes 90 true-false questions and is divided into 10 subscales, including cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, independence, achievement-orientation, intellectual-cultural orientation, active-recreational orientation, moral-religious emphasis, organization, and control. The Chinese version of FES was revised by Fei et al. (1991) and used in this study. Three subscales closely related to aggression were selected, including cohesion, conflict, and moral-religious emphasis, with 27 items in total. The family environment score was the sum of scores of these three subscales (the conflict subscale was first inverted). The Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.75.

Normative Beliefs About Aggression Scale (NOBAGS)

There are 20 items in the NOBAGS ( Huesmann and Guerra, 1997 ), which includes retaliation (12 items) and general (8 items) aggression belief. A 4-point Likert scale is used (1, absolutely wrong; 4, absolutely right). The subjects were asked to assess the accuracy of the behavior described in each item. High score means high level of normative beliefs about aggression. The revised Chinese version of NOBAGS consists of two factors: retaliation (nine items) and general (six items) aggression belief. Its internal consistency coefficient and test-retest reliability are 0.81 and 0.79. Confirmative factor analysis showed that this version has good construct validity: χ 2  = 280.09, df  = 89, χ 2 / df  = 3.15, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR = 0.04, NFI = 0.95, NNFI = 0.96, and CFI = 0.96 ( Shao and Wang, 2017 ). In this study, the Cronbach’s α coefficient of the Chinese version was 0.88.

Group testing was performed in randomly selected classes of six middle schools. All subjects completed the above four questionnaires.

Data Analysis

IBM SPSS Statistics 22 was used to analysis the correlations among study variables, the mediating effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression, and the moderating role of family environment in the relationship between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression. In order to validate the moderated mediation model, Mplus 7 was also used.

Correlation Analysis Among Study Variables

In this study, self-reported questionnaires were used to collect data, and results might be influenced by common method bias. Therefore, the Harman’s single-factor test was used to assess common method bias before data analysis. The results showed that eigenvalues of 34 unrotated factors were greater than 1, and the amount of variation explained by the first factor was 10.01%, which is much less than 40% of the critical value. Accordingly, common method bias was not significant in this study.

As described in Table 1 , the degree of exposure to violent video games showed significant positive correlations to normative beliefs about aggression and aggression; family environment was negatively correlated to normative beliefs about aggression and aggression; normative beliefs about aggression were significantly and positively related to aggression. The gender difference of exposure to violent video games ( t  = 7.93, p  < 0.001) and normative beliefs about aggression ( t  = 2.74, p  < 0.01) were significant, which boys scored significantly higher than girls.

Table 1 . Means, standard deviations, and Pearson correlations among study variables.

Mediating Effect Analysis

To examine the mediation effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression, gender factor was controlled firstly. Stepwise regression analysis showed that the regression of aggression to violent video games ( c  = 0.28, t  = 6.96, p  < 0.001), the regression of normative beliefs about aggression to violent video games ( a  = 0.19, t  = 4.69, p  < 0.001), and the regression of aggression to violent video games ( c ′ = 0.22, t  = 5.69, p  < 0.001) and normative beliefs about aggression ( b  = 0.31, t  = 8.25, p  < 0.001) were all significant. Thus, normative beliefs about aggression played a partial mediating role in exposure to violent video games and aggression. The mediation effect value was 0.06, accounting for 21.43% (0.06/0.28) of the total effect.

Moderated Mediation Effect Analysis

After standardizing scores of exposure to violent videogames, normative beliefs about aggression, family environment, and aggression, two interaction terms were calculated, including family environment × exposure to violent video games and family environment × normative beliefs about aggression. Regression analysis was carried out after controlling gender factor ( Table 2 ).

Table 2 . Moderated mediation effect analysis of the relationship between violent video exposure and aggression.

In the first step, a simple moderated model (Model 1) between exposure to violent video games and aggression was established. The result showed that exposure to violent video games had a significant effect on aggression ( c 1  = 0.24, t  = 6.13, p  < 0.001), while the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on aggression was not significant ( c 3  = 0.05, t  = −1.31, p  = 0.19), indicating that the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression was not moderated by family environment.

Next, a moderated model (Model 2) between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression was established. The results showed that exposure to violent video games had a significant effect on normative beliefs about aggression ( a 1  = 0.13, t  = 3.42, p  < 0.001), and the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression was significant ( a 3  = −0.13, t  = −3.63, p  < 0.01).

In the third step, a moderated mediation model (Model 3) between exposure to violent video games and aggression was established. As shown in Table 2 , the effect of normative beliefs about aggression on aggression was significant ( b 1  = 0.24, t  = 6.15, p  < 0.001), and the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression was not significant ( b 2  = 0.02, t  = 0.40, p  = 0.69). Because both a 3 and b 1 were significant, exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression constituted a moderated mediation model. Normative beliefs about aggression played a mediating role between exposure to violent video games and aggression, while family environment was a moderator between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression. Mplus analysis proved that the moderated mediation model had good model fitting (χ 2 / df  = 1.54, CFI = 0.99, TLI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.03, and SRMR = 0.01).

To further analyze the moderating effect of the family environment and exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression, the family environment was divided into the high and low groups, according to the principle of standard deviation, and a simple slope test was performed ( Figure 1 ). The results found that for individuals with high score of family environment, prediction of exposure to violent video games to normative beliefs about aggression was not significant ( b  = 0.08, SE  = 0.08, p  = 0.37). For individuals with low score of family environment, exposure to violent video games could significantly predict normative beliefs about aggression ( b  = 0.34, SE  = 0.09, p  < 0.001). Based on the overall findings, individuals with high scores of family environment showed a nonsignificant mediating effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relation of exposure to violent video games and aggression; however, for individuals with low scores of family environment, normative beliefs about aggression played a partial mediating role in the effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression.

Figure 1 . The moderating effect of the family environment on the relationship between violent video game exposure and normative beliefs about aggression.

Main Findings and Implications

This study found a significantly positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, corroborating existing studies ( Anderson, 2004 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; DeLisi et al., 2013 ; Greitemeyer and Mugge, 2014 ). Anderson et al. (2017) assessed teenagers in Australia, China, Germany, the United States, and other three countries and found that exposure to violent media, including television, movies, and video games, is positively related to adolescent aggression, demonstrating cross-cultural consistency; 8% of variance in aggression could be independently explained by exposure to violent media. In this study, after controlling for gender and family environment, R 2 for exposure to violent video games in predicting adolescent aggression was 0.05, indicating that 5% of variation in adolescent aggression could be explained by exposure to violent media. These consistent findings confirm the effect of exposure to violent video games on adolescent aggression and can be explained by the GAM. According to the GAM ( Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson and Carnagey, 2014 ), violent video games can make teenagers acquire, repeat, and reinforce aggression-related knowledge structures, including aggressive beliefs and attitude, aggressive perceptual schemata, aggressive expectation schemata, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggression desensitization. Therefore, aggressive personality is promoted, increasing the possibility of aggressive behavior. The Hypothesis 1 of this study was validated and provided evidence for the GAM.

As shown above, normative beliefs about aggression had a partial mediation effect on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression. Exposure to violent video games, on the one hand, can predict adolescent aggression directly; on the other hand, it had an indirect effect on adolescent aggression via normative beliefs about aggression. According to the above results, when exposure to violent video games changes by 1 standard deviation, adolescent aggression varies by 0.28 standard deviation, with 0.22 standard deviation being a direct effect of exposure to violent video games on adolescent aggression and 0.06 standard deviation representing the effect through normative beliefs about aggression. Too much violence in video games makes it easy for individuals to become accustomed to violence and emotionally apathetic towards the harmful consequences of violence. Moreover, it can make individuals accept the idea that violence is a good way of problem solving, leading to an increase in normative beliefs about aggression; under certain situational cues, it is more likely to become violent or aggressive. This conclusion is supported by other studies ( Gentile et al., 2014 ; Anderson et al., 2017 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ). Like Hypothesis 1, Hypothesis 2 was validated the GAM.

One of the main findings of this study was the validation of Hypothesis 3: a moderated mediation model was constructed involving exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression. Family environment moderated the first half of the mediation process of violent video games, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression. In this study, family environment encompassed three factors, including (1) cohesion reflecting the degree of mutual commitment, assistance, and support among family members; (2) conflict reflecting the extent of anger, aggression, and conflict among family members; and (3) moral-religious emphasis reflecting the degree of emphasis on ethics, religion, and values. Individuals with high scores of family environment often help each other; seldom show anger, attack, and contradiction openly; and pay more attention to morality and values. These positive aspects would help them understand violence in video games from the right perspective, reduce recognition and acceptance of violence or aggression, and diminish the effect of violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression. Hence, exposure to violent video games could not predict normative beliefs about aggression of these individuals. By contrast, individuals with low scores of family environment are less likely to help each other; they often openly show anger, attack, and contradiction and do not pay much attention to morality and values. These negative aspects would not decrease but increase their acceptance of violence and aggression. For these individuals, because of the lack of mitigation mechanisms, exposure to violent video games could predict normative beliefs about aggression significantly.

The moderated mediation model of the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression could not only help reveal that exposure to violent video games can affect aggression but also provide an elaboration of the influencing mechanism. According to this model, for individuals with high scores of family environment, exposure to violent video games had only direct effect on aggression. However, for those with low scores of family environment, there was not only a direct effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression but also an indirect effect mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. In short, exposure to violence video games affecting aggression through normative beliefs about aggression is more likely to happen to adolescents with poor family environment than those with good family environment. That is, generation of adolescent aggression is not only related to internal cognitive factors but also to external situations. As Piotrowski and Valkenburg ( Piotrowski and Valkenburg, 2015 ; Valkenburg, 2015 ) pointed out, the effect of violent video games/media on adolescents is a complex interaction of dispositional, developmental, and social factors, and individual differences in susceptibility to these three factors determine the nature and the extent of this influence. The proposed model incorporated some perspectives of GAM and CM: while confirming the effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression occurrence, the combined effect of individual and environmental factors was verified.

Compared with the simple mediation or moderation model, the present moderated mediation model provided deeper insights into the internal mechanism of the effect of violent video games on aggression, providing inspirations for preventing adolescent aggression. First, in view of the close relationship between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, relevant government departments should continue to improve the grading system of video games; meanwhile, parents should appropriately monitor the types of video games used by teenagers as well as the time spent and reduce the degree of exposure to violent video games. Second, by allowing teenagers to objectively distinguish between violence in games and reality, the mediating role of normative beliefs about aggression could inspire people to identify rational ways to solve violence problems and to experience the hurtful consequences of aggression. This would help adolescents change normative beliefs about aggression, establish a correct view of right and wrong, and reduce the occurrence of aggression. Finally, the moderating effect of family environment on the mediation process suggests that more attention should be paid to the important role of family environment. On the one hand, family education is closely related to adolescent aggression. Then, parents should create a good family atmosphere, publicly show anger and aggression as little as possible, and advocate and practice positive moral values. Parents should adopt authoritative styles, abandoning autocratic and indulgent parenting styles ( Casas et al., 2006 ; Sandstrom, 2007 ; Underwood et al., 2009 ; Kawabata et al., 2011 ) to minimize the negative effect of exposure to violent video games. On the other hand, for teenagers with poor family environment, while reducing exposure to violent video games, it is particularly important to change their normative beliefs about aggression, no longer viewing aggression as an alternative way to solve problems.

Limitations

Limitations of the current study should be mentioned. First, only Chinese school students were assessed, in a relatively small number, which could affect sample representativeness. A large sample of teenagers from different countries and in different ages, also including juvenile offenders, would be more accurate in revealing the effect of violent video games on adolescent aggression. Second, this study only focused on violent video games, not involving violent media such as internet and television, daily life events, wars, and other major social events. Indeed, these factors also have important effects on adolescent aggression, and their influencing mechanisms and combined effect are worth investigating further. Third, this study mainly adopted the self-report method. Use of peer, parent, or teacher reports to assess exposure to violent video games and aggression would help improve the effectiveness of the study. Fourth, there might be other mediators, moderating variables and relational models. In addition to normative beliefs about aggression and family environment, individual emotions, personality characteristics, school climate, and companions may play mediating or moderating roles in the relationship between violent video games and aggression. This study developed a moderated mediation model between family environment and normative beliefs about aggression, but the possibility of multiple mediation and mediated moderation models cannot be ruled out.

The current study showed that exposure to violent video games is positively related to adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression have a mediating effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while the family environment regulates the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with good family environment, exposure to violent video games only has a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, there is an indirect effect mediated by normative beliefs about aggression alongside a direct effect. This moderated mediation model incorporates some perspectives of GAM and CM, enriching studies of generative mechanism of adolescent aggression.

Author Contributions

YW and RS conceived the idea of the study. RS analyzed the data. YW and RS interpreted the results and wrote the paper. YW discussed the results and revised the manuscript.

This study was supported by a grant from the National Social Science Foundation of China (14CSH017) to YW.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Anderson, C. A. (2004). An update on the effects of playing violent video games. J. Adolesc. 27, 113–122. doi: 10.1016/j.adolescence.2003.10.009

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Anderson, C. A., and Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: a meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychol. Sci. 12, 353–359. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00366

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Anderson, C. A., and Carnagey, N. L. (2014). “The role of theory in the study of media violence: the general aggression model” in Media violence and children. ed. Gentile, D. A. (Westport, CT: Praeger), 103–133.

Google Scholar

Anderson, C. A., Carnagey, N. L., Flanagan, M., Benjamin, A. J., Eubanks, J., and Valentine, J. C. (2004). Violent video games: specific effects of violent content on aggressive thoughts and behavior. Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 36, 199–249. doi: 10.1016/S0065-2601(04)36004-1

Anderson, C. A., and Dill, K. E. (2000). Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 78, 772–790. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.78.4.772

Anderson, C. A., Sakamoto, A., Gentile, D. A., Ihori, N., Shibuya, A., Yukawa, S., et al. (2008). Longitudinal effects of violent video games on aggression in Japan and the United States. Pediatrics 122, e1067–e1072. doi: 10.1542/peds.2008-1425

Anderson, C. A., Shibuya, A., Ihori, N., Swing, E. L., Bushman, B. J., Sakamoto, A., et al. (2010). Violent video game effects on aggression, empathy, and prosocial behavior in eastern and western countries: a meta-analytic review. Psychol. Bull. 136, 151–173. doi: 10.1037/a0018251

Anderson, C. A., Suzuki, K., Swing, E. L., Groves, C. L., Gentile, D. A., Prot, S., et al. (2017). Media violence and other aggression risk factors in seven nations. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 43, 986–998. doi: 10.1177/0146167217703064

Bailey, C. A., and Ostrov, J. M. (2008). Differentiating forms and functions of aggression in emerging adults: associations with hostile attribution biases and normative beliefs. J. Youth Adolesc. 37, 713–722. doi: 10.1007/s10964-007-9211-5

Bailey, K., West, R., and Anderson, C. A. (2011). The association between chronic exposure to video game violence and affective picture processing: an ERP study. Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci. 11, 259–276. doi: 10.3758/s13415-011-0029-y

Bandura, A. (1989). “Social cognitive theory” in Annals of child development: Six theories of child development. ed. Vasta, R. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press), 1–60.

Batanova, M., and Loukas, A. (2014). Unique and interactive effects of empathy, family, and school factors on early adolescents’ aggression. J. Youth Adolesc. 43, 1890–1902. doi: 10.1007/s10964-013-0051-1

Boxer, P., Groves, C. L., and Docherty, M. (2015). Video games do indeed influence children and adolescents’ aggression, prosocial behavior, and academic performance: a clearer reading of Ferguson (2015). Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 10, 671–673. doi: 10.1177/1745691615592239

Burton, K. A., Dan, F., and Wygant, D. B. (2013). The role of peer attachment and normative beliefs about aggression on traditional bullying and cyberbullying. Psychol. Schools 50, 103–115. doi: 10.1002/pits.21663

Bushman, B. J., and Anderson, C. A. (2002). Violent video games and hostile expectations: a test of the general aggression model. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 28, 1679–1686. doi: 10.1177/014616702237649

Buss, A. H., and Perry, M. (1992). The aggression questionnaire. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 63, 452–459. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.63.3.452

Casas, J. F., Weigel, S. M., Crick, N. R., Ostrov, J. M., Woods, K. E., Jansen Yeh, E. A., et al. (2006). Early parenting and children’s relational and physical aggression in the preschool and home contexts. J. Appl. Dev. Psychol. 27, 209–227. doi: 10.1016/j.appdev.2006.02.003

Chen, H., Liu, Y., and Cui, W. (2012). The relationship between online violent video games and aggressive behavior: the mediating effect of college students’ attitudes towards violence. Chinese J. Special Educ. 8, 79–84.

DeLisi, M., Vaughn, M. G., Gentile, D. A., Anderson, C. A., and Shook, J. (2013). Violent video games, delinquency, and youth violence: new evidence. Youth Violence Juv. J. 11, 132–142. doi: 10.1177/1541204012460874

Duan, D., Zhang, X., Wei, L., Zhou, Y., and Liu, C. (2014). The impact of violent media on aggression: the role of normative belief and empathy. Psychol. Dev. Educ. 30, 185–192.

Fei, L., Shen, Q., Zheng, Y., Zhao, J., Jiang, S., Wang, L., and Wang, X. (1991). Preliminary evaluation of Chinese version of FACES and FES: comparison of normal families and families of schizophrenic patients. Chin. Ment. Health. J. 5, 198–202, 238.

Ferguson, C. J. (2007). Evidence for publication bias in video game violence effects literature: a meta-analytic review. Aggress. Violent Behav. 12, 470–482. doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2007.01.001

Ferguson, C. J. (2013). Adolescents, crime, and the media: A critical analysis. New York, NY: Springer.

Ferguson, C. J. (2015). Do angry birds make for angry children? A meta-analysis of video game influences on children’s and adolescents’ aggression, mental health, prosocial behavior, and academic performance. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 10, 646–666. doi: 10.1177/1745691615592234

Ferguson, C. J., Rueda, S., Cruz, A., Ferguson, D., Fritz, S., and Smith, S. (2008). Violent video games and aggression: causal relationship or byproduct of family violence and intrinsic violence motivation? Crim. Justice Behav. 31, 2231–2237. doi: 10.1002/chin.200028107

Ferguson, C. J., San Miguel, C., Garza, A., and Jerabeck, J. M. (2012). A longitudinal test of video game violence influences on dating and aggression: a 3-year longitudinal study of adolescents. J. Psychiatr. Res. 46, 141–146. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2011.10.014

Ferguson, C. J., San Miguel, C., and Hartley, R. D. (2009). A multivariate analysis of youth violence and aggression: the influence of family, peers, depression, and media violence. J. Pediatr. 155, 904–908. e903. doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2009.06.021

Fikkers, K. M., Piotrowski, J. T., and Valkenburg, P. M. (2017). A matter of style? Exploring the effects of parental mediation styles on early adolescents’ media violence exposure and aggression. Comput. Hum. Behav. 70, 407–415. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2017.01.029

Fikkers, K. M., Piotrowski, J. T., Weeda, W. D., Vossen, H. G. M., and Valkenburg, P. M. (2013). Double dose: high family conflict enhances the effect of media violence exposure on adolescents’ aggression. Societies 3, 280–292. doi: 10.3390/soc3030280

Furuya-Kanamori, L., and Doi, S. A. (2016). Angry birds, angry children, and angry meta-analysts: a reanalysis. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 11, 408–414. doi: 10.1177/1745691616635599

Gentile, D. A. (2015). What is a good skeptic to do? the case for skepticism in the media violence discussion. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 10, 674–676. doi: 10.1177/1745691615592238

Gentile, D. A., Li, D., Khoo, A., Prot, S., and Anderson, C. A. (2014). Mediators and moderators of long-term effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior: practice, thinking, and action. JAMA Pediatr. 168, 450–457. doi: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2014.63

Greitemeyer, T. (2014). Intense acts of violence during video game play make daily life aggression appear innocuous: a new mechanism why violent video games increase aggression. J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 50, 52–56. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2013.09.004

Greitemeyer, T., and Mugge, D. O. (2014). Video games do affect social outcomes: a meta-analytic review of the effects of violent and prosocial video game play. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 40, 578–589. doi: 10.1177/0146167213520459

Groves, C. L., Anderson, C. A., and DeLisi, M. (2014). A response to Ferguson: more red herring. PsycCRITIQUES 59, 9. doi: 10.1037/a0036266

Huesmann, L. R., Dubow, E. F., Boxer, P., Landau, S. F., Gvirsman, S. D., and Shikaki, K. (2017). Children’s exposure to violent political conflict stimulates aggression at peers by increasing emotional distress, aggressive script rehearsal, and normative beliefs favoring aggression. Dev. Psychopathol. 29, 39–50. doi: 10.1017/S0954579416001115

Huesmann, L. R., and Guerra, N. G. (1997). Children’s normative beliefs about aggression and aggressive behavior. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 72, 408–419. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.72.2.408

Kawabata, Y., Alink, L. R. A., Tseng, W. L., Van Ijzendoorn, M. H., and Crick, N. R. (2011). Maternal and paternal parenting styles associated with relational aggression in children and adolescents: a conceptual analysis and meta-analytic review. Dev. Rev. 31, 240–278. doi: 10.1016/j.dr.2011.08.001

Kepes, S., Bushman, B. J., and Anderson, C. A. (2017). Violent video game effects remain a societal concern: reply to Hilgard, Engelhardt, and Rouder (2017). Psychol. Bull. 143, 775–782. doi: 10.1037/bul0000112

Kowalski, R. M., Giumetti, G. W., Schroeder, A. N., and Lattanner, M. R. (2014). Bullying in the digital age: a critical review and meta-analysis of cyberbullying research among youth. Psychol. Bull. 140, 1073–1137. doi: 10.1037/a0035618

Krahe, B., and Busching, R. (2014). Interplay of normative beliefs and behavior in developmental patterns of physical and relational aggression in adolescence: a four-wave longitudinal study. Front. Psychol. 5:1146. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01146

Li, J. B., Nie, Y. G., Boardley, I. D., Dou, K., and Situ, Q. M. (2015). When do normative beliefs about aggression predict aggressive behavior? an application of I3 theory. Aggress. Behav. 41, 544–555. doi: 10.1002/ab.21594

Lim, S. H., and Ang, R. P. (2009). Relationship between boys’ normative beliefs about aggression and their physical, verbal, and indirect aggressive behaviors. Adolescence 44, 635–650.

PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar

Linder, J., and Werner, N. E. (2012). Relationally aggressive media exposure and children’s normative beliefs: does parental mediation matter? Fam. Relat. 61, 488–500. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00707.x

Liu, Y., Teng, Z., Lan, H., Zhang, X., and Yao, D. (2015). Short-term effects of prosocial video games on aggression: an event-related potential study. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 9:193. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00193

Machackova, H., and Pfetsch, J. (2016). Bystanders’ responses to offline bullying and cyberbullying: the role of empathy and normative beliefs about aggression. Scand. J. Psychol. 57, 169–176. doi: 10.1111/sjop.12277

Markey, P. M. (2015). Finding the middle ground in violent video game research lessons from Ferguson (2015). Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 10, 667–670. doi: 10.1177/1745691615592236

Moos, R. H. (1990). Conceptual and empirical approaches to developing family-based assessment procedures: resolving the case of the Family Environment Scale. Fam. Process 29, 199–208; discussion 209-111. doi: 10.1111/j.1545-5300.1990.00199.x

Nathanson, A. I. (1999). Identifying and explaining the relationship between parental mediation and children’s aggression. Commun. Res. 26, 124–143.

Padilla-Walker, L. M., Coyne, S. M., and Collier, K. M. (2016). Longitudinal relations between parental media monitoring and adolescent aggression, prosocial behavior, and externalizing problems. J. Adolesc. 46, 86–97. doi: 10.1016/j.adolescence.2015.11.002

Piotrowski, J. T., and Valkenburg, P. M. (2015). Finding orchids in a field of dandelions: understanding children’s differential susceptibility to media effects. Am. Behav. Sci. 59, 1776–1789. doi: 10.1177/0002764215596552

Rasmussen, E. E. (2014). Proactive vs. retroactive mediation: effects of mediation’s timing on children’s reactions to popular cartoon violence. Hum. Commun. Res. 40, 396–413. doi: 10.1111/hcre.12030

Rosenthal, R., and Rosnow, R. (1991). Essentials of behavioral research: Methods and data analysis. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Rothstein, H. R., and Bushman, B. J. (2015). Methodological and reporting errors in meta-analytic reviews make other meta-analysts angry: a commentary on Ferguson (2015). Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 10, 677–679. doi: 10.1177/1745691615592235

Sandstrom, M. J. (2007). A link between mothers’ disciplinary strategies and children’s relational aggression. Brit. J. Dev. Psychol. 25, 399–407. doi: 10.1348/026151006X158753

Shao, R., and Wang, Y. (2017). Reliability and validity of normative beliefs about aggression scale among middle school students. Chin. J. Clin. Psychol. 25, 1035–1038.

Sherry, J. L. (2001). The effects of violent video games on aggression. Hum. Commun. Res. 27, 409–431. doi: 10.1093/hcr/27.3.409

Underwood, M. K., Beron, K. J., and Rosen, L. H. (2009). Continuity and change in social and physical aggression from middle childhood through early adolescence. Aggress. Behav. 35, 357–375. doi: 10.1002/ab.20313

Valkenburg, P. M. (2015). The limited informativeness of meta-analyses of media effects. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 10, 680–682. doi: 10.1177/1745691615592237

Werner, N. E., and Hill, L. G. (2010). Individual and peer group normative beliefs about relational aggression. Child Dev. 81, 826–836. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01436.x

Wiegman, O., and Schie, E. G. (1998). Video game playing and its relations with aggressive and prosocial behaviour. Brit. J. Soc. Psychol. 37, 367–378. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.1998.tb01177.x

Wright, M. F., and Li, Y. (2013). Normative beliefs about aggression and cyber aggression among young adults: a longitudinal investigation. Aggress. Behav. 39, 161–170. doi: 10.1002/ab.21470

Yang, G. S., Huesmann, L. R., and Bushman, B. J. (2014). Effects of playing a violent video game as male versus female avatar on subsequent aggression in male and female players. Aggress. Behav. 40, 537–541. doi: 10.1002/ab.21551

Ying, X., and Dai, C. (2008). Empathy and aggressive behavior of middle school students: the mediating effect of the anger-hostility action. Psychol. Dev. Educ. 24, 73–78.

Keywords: violence video games, aggression, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, moderated mediation effect

Citation: Shao R and Wang Y (2019) The Relation of Violent Video Games to Adolescent Aggression: An Examination of Moderated Mediation Effect. Front. Psychol . 10:384. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00384

Received: 25 September 2017; Accepted: 07 February 2019; Published: 21 February 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Shao and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Yunqiang Wang, [email protected] ; [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

The evidence that video game violence leads to real-world aggression

A 2018 meta-analysis found that there is a small increase in real-world physical aggression among adolescents and pre-teens who play violent video games. Led by Jay Hull, a social psychologist at Dartmouth College, the study team pooled data from 24 previous studies in an attempt to avoid some of the problems that have made the question of a connection between gaming and aggression controversial.

Many previous studies, according to a story in Scientific American, have been criticized by “a small but vocal cadre of researchers [who] have argued much of the work implicating video games has serious flaws in that, among other things, it measures the frequency of aggressive thoughts or language rather than physically aggressive behaviors like hitting or pushing, which have more real-world relevance.”

Hull and team limited their analysis to studies that “measured the relationship between violent video game use and overt physical aggression,” according to the Scientific American article .

The Dartmouth analysis drew on 24 studies involving more than 17,000 participants and found that “playing violent video games is associated with increases in physical aggression over time in children and teens,” according to a Dartmouth press release describing the study , which was published Oct. 1, 2018, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

The studies the Dartmouth team analyzed “tracked physical aggression among users of violent video games for periods ranging from three months to four years. Examples of physical aggression included incidents such as hitting someone or being sent to the school principal’s office for fighting, and were based on reports from children, parents, teachers, and peers,” according to the press release.

The study was almost immediately called in to question. In an editorial in Psychology Today , a pair of professors claim the results of the meta-analysis are not statistically significant. Hull and team wrote in the PNAS paper that, while small, the results are indeed significant. The Psychology Today editorial makes an appeal to a 2017 statement by the American Psychological Association’s media psychology and technology division “cautioning policy makers and news media to stop linking violent games to serious real-world aggression as the data is just not there to support such beliefs.”

It should be noted, however, that the 2017 statement questions the connection between “serious” aggression while the APA Resolution of 2015 , based on a review of its 2005 resolution by its own experts, found that “the link between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior is one of the most studied and best established. Since the earlier meta-analyses, this link continues to be a reliable finding and shows good multi-method consistency across various representations of both violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior.”

While the effect sizes are small, they’ve been similar across many studies, according to the APA resolution. The problem has been the interpretation of aggression, with some writers claiming an unfounded connection between homicides, mass shootings, and other extremes of violence. The violence the APA resolution documents is more mundane and involves the kind of bullying that, while often having dire long-term consequences, is less immediately dangerous: “insults, threats, hitting, pushing, hair pulling, biting and other forms of verbal and physical aggression.”

Minor and micro-aggressions, though, do have significant health risks, especially for mental health. People of color, LGBTQ people , and women everywhere experience higher levels of depression and anger, as well as stress-related disorders, including heart disease, asthma, obesity, accelerated aging, and premature death. The costs of even minor aggression are laid at the feet of the individuals who suffer, their friends and families, and society at large as the cost of healthcare skyrockets.

Finally, it should be noted that studies looking for a connection between game violence and physical aggression are not looking at the wider context of the way we enculturate children, especially boys. As WSU’s Stacey Hust and Kathleen Rodgers have shown, you don’t have to prove a causative effect to know that immersing kids in games filled with violence and sexist tropes leads to undesirable consequences, particularly the perpetuation of interpersonal violence in intimate relationships.

No wonder, then, that when feminist media critic Anita Saarkesian launched her YouTube series, “ Tropes vs. Women in Video Games ,” she was the target of vitriol and violence. Years later she’d joke about “her first bomb threat,” but that was only after her life had been upended by the boys club that didn’t like “this woman” showing them the “grim evidence of industry-wide sexism.”

Read more about WSU research and study on video games in “ What’s missing in video games .”

Violent Video Games and Aggression: The Connection Is Dubious, at Best

• Childhood Development
• Perspectives on Psychological Science
• Video Games

Summary: If you are worried about violent video games triggering aggressive behavior in children, new research may help to alleviate your concerns.

The coronavirus pandemic put a damper on many traditional summertime activities for kids, like trips to the pool and youth camps. This gave more opportunity for children to socialize with friends virtually through online gaming. But many hours of extra screen time may have worried parents, especially in light of a highly publicized 2015 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) linking violent video games with aggressive behavior in children.

However, a recent reanalysis of these findings published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science came to a very different conclusion, finding no clear link between video game violence and aggression in children. Both the 2015 and the 2020 studies were meta-analyses, statistical methods of finding significant patterns in a large group of independent studies.

“Our new meta-analysis found that the evidence base was not sufficient to make the conclusions outlined in the 2015 report,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, lead author on the new paper and a professor of psychology at Stetson University. “We found that violent video games do not appear to be linked to aggression.”

When Ferguson and his colleagues reexamined the data used in the earlier meta-analysis, they found that it did not include most of the existing studies of video games and violence and failed to take quality issues into consideration.

“Studies that are well designed, such as those using standardized and well-validated aggression measures, almost never find evidence for negative, violent effects,” said Ferguson. “Our new meta-analysis also illustrates the need to focus on well-designed studies when researching the impact of violent media.”

“Games are now more important than ever for socialization, feeling autonomy and control during an uncertain time, and just de-stressing,” said Ferguson.

Additional research on the potential connection between video games and violent behavior is featured in the APS Research Topic Video Games and Violence .

Reference : Ferguson, C. J., Coperhaver, A., & Marley, P. (2020). Reexamining the Findings of the American Psychological Association’s 2015 Task Force on Violent Media: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620927666

Perspectives on Psychological Science  is a bimonthly journal publishing an eclectic mix of provocative reports and articles, including broad integrative reviews, overviews of research programs, meta-analyses, theoretical statements, and articles on topics such as the philosophy of science, opinion pieces about major issues in the field, autobiographical reflections of senior members of the field, and even occasional humorous essays and sketches.

APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. By posting a comment, you agree to our Community Guidelines and the display of your profile information, including your name and affiliation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations present in article comments are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of APS or the article’s author. For more information, please see our Community Guidelines .

Please login with your APS account to comment.

Vaccinating Against Bunk: Curbing Viral Misinformation

Online games and nudges aim to curb viral misinformation around vaccines and more.

Technology in Context: The Surprising Social Upsides of Constant Connectivity

The very same technologies that make social distancing bearable in the age of COVID-19 have also been cited among leading causes of social isolation and mental health issues. Psychological research suggests a more nuanced reality.

Games Can Be Good – When You Play for the Right Reasons

The effects of playing video games on well-being seem to depend largely on why and how an individual chooses to partake.

Privacy Overview

New Research Casts Doubt on the Link Between Violent Video Games and Aggression

A recent study has reignited the ongoing debate over the effects of violent video games (VVGs) on aggression , challenging longstanding assumptions within psychological research. Conducted by researchers Yashvin Seetahul and Tobias Greitemeyer, the study explores how demand characteristics – subtle cues that may influence participants’ behaviour –can significantly skew the results of studies examining the relationship between violent video games and aggression. The findings were published in the journal  Social Psychological and Personality Science .

For decades, the question of whether playing violent video games leads to increased aggression has divided psychologists. Despite the fact that numerous studies have suggested a correlation, this new study emphasizes the possibility that the participants’ perceptions of the study’s purpose may have an impact on these findings.

The study involved two experiments, with the first focusing on behavioural aggression and the second on trait aggression. In both experiments, participants were randomly assigned to different conditions where they were informed that the researchers aimed to confirm either that violent video games increase aggression or that they have no effect. A third group in the second experiment was not given any information about the study’s hypothesis.

The results were striking. When participants were led to believe that the researchers wanted to prove a link between video games and aggression, those who regularly played violent games displayed less aggression than in other conditions. This suggests that habitual players of violent video games might adjust their responses to counteract the perceived bias of the researchers, thereby reducing the apparent relationship between game play and aggression.

This phenomenon, known as a demand effect, occurs when participants’ behaviour is influenced by their interpretation of the study’s aims rather than by the variables being measured. In this case, it appears that frequent players of violent video games may have been motivated to downplay aggressive tendencies, possibly as a way to challenge the stereotype that gamers are more aggressive.

The study’s authors argue that these findings call into question the validity of many previous studies that have linked violent video games to aggression. They suggest that if participants are aware or suspicious of the study’s goals, they might consciously or unconsciously alter their responses, thus distorting the data.

This research also highlights the broader issue of demand characteristics in psychological experiments. The study’s authors note that these subtle cues can originate from various sources, including the way a study is advertised, the instructions given to participants, or even the design of the experiment itself. They advocate for greater attention to be paid to these factors in future research to ensure more accurate results.

Related Articles

New study finds no evidence linking social media use to teen mental health issues, content creators are caught between algorithms and authenticity, social media could hold the key to detecting depression, study suggests, cyberchondria linked to heightened health anxiety in pakistan, study reveals, study reveals instagram comparisons are increasing stress for millennial mothers, debunking the myths: ai and robotics are transforming industries, not taking jobs, study finds strong link between phone dependency and catch-up sleep among south korean youth, study finds cash-out features lead to riskier bets on sports apps, new study explores efficacy of ai-enabled mental wellness platform for workplace stress, gamification proves effective in promoting healthy habits among socially deprived adolescents, digital mental health interventions reduce self-injury risk in adolescents, finds study, self-concept found to reduce cyberbullying risk, study shows, new data reveals brits are projected to spend 25 years of their lifetime working on a screen, smartphone zombies pose growing danger in uk cities, new study warns, linkedin usage can heighten imposter syndrome, leading to anxiety, study reveals evolutionary impact of website design on user perception, usability and design are key to success of fitness apps for adolescents, according to new study, how healthcare apps are enhancing children’s well-being, social media influencers affect adolescent health, body image, and nutrition – finds new study, what makes the meta quest 3 charging dock a must-have accessory for gamers, take a break, have a social media detox, fried and frazzled: 5 signs you might need a digital detox, ai in video job interviews effective but shows gender bias, study finds, navigating the digital playground this summer: benefits, risks, and finding balance for kids online.

Psychreg is a digital media company and not a clinical company. Our content does not constitute a medical or psychological consultation. See a certified medical or mental health professional for diagnosis.

• Privacy Policy

© Copyright 2014–2034 Psychreg Ltd

• PSYCHREG JOURNAL
• MEET OUR WRITERS
• MEET THE TEAM

APA Review Confirms Link Between Playing Violent Video Games and Aggression

• Physical Abuse and Violence
• Video Games

Finds insufficient research to link violent video game play to criminal violence

WASHINGTON — Violent video game play is linked to increased aggression in players but insufficient evidence exists about whether the link extends to criminal violence or delinquency, according to a new American Psychological Association task force report.

“The research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression,” says the report of the APA Task Force on Violent Media. The task force’s review is the first in this field to examine the breadth of studies included and to undertake multiple approaches to reviewing the literature.

“Scientists have investigated the use of violent video games for more than two decades but to date, there is very limited research addressing whether violent video games cause people to commit acts of criminal violence,” said Mark Appelbaum, PhD, task force chair. “However, the link between violence in video games and increased aggression in players is one of the most studied and best established in the field.”

“No single risk factor consistently leads a person to act aggressively or violently,” the report states. “Rather, it is the accumulation of risk factors that tends to lead to aggressive or violent behavior. The research reviewed here demonstrates that violent video game use is one such risk factor.”

In light of the task force’s conclusions, APA has called on the industry to design video games that include increased parental control over the amount of violence the games contain. APA’s Council of Representatives adopted a resolution at its meeting Aug. 7 in Toronto encouraging the Entertainment Software Rating Board to refine its video game rating system “to reflect the levels and characteristics of violence in games, in addition to the current global ratings.” In addition, the resolution urges developers to design games that are appropriate to users’ age and psychological development, and voices APA’s support for more research to address gaps in the knowledge about the effects of violent video game use.

The resolution replaces a 2005 resolution on the same topic.

The task force identified a number of limitations in the research that require further study. These include a general failure to look for any differences in outcomes between boys and girls who play violent video games; a dearth of studies that have examined the effects of violent video game play on children younger than 10; and a lack of research that has examined the games’ effects over the course of children’s development.

“We know that there are numerous risk factors for aggressive behavior,” Appelbaum said. “What researchers need to do now is conduct studies that look at the effects of video game play in people at risk for aggression or violence due to a combination of risk factors. For example, how do depression or delinquency interact with violent video game use?”

The task force conducted a comprehensive review of the research literature published between 2005 and 2013 focused on violent video game use. This included four meta-analyses that reviewed more than 150 research reports published before 2009. Task force members then conducted both a systematic evidence review and a quantitative review of the literature published between 2009 and 2013. (A systematic evidence review synthesizes all empirical evidence that meets pre-specified criteria to answer specific research questions — a standard approach to summarizing large bodies of research to explore a field of research.) This resulted in 170 articles, 31 of which met all of the most stringent screening criteria.

“While there is some variation among the individual studies, a strong and consistent general pattern has emerged from many years of research that provides confidence in our general conclusions,” Appelbaum said. “As with most areas of science, the picture presented by this research is more complex than is usually included in news coverage and other information prepared for the general public.”

In addition to Appelbaum, members of the APA Task Force on Violent Media were: Sandra Calvert, PhD; Kenneth Dodge, PhD; Sandra Graham, PhD; Gordon N. Hall, PhD; Sherry Hamby, PhD; and Larry Hedges, PhD.

The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes more than 122,500 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.

Public Affairs

(202) 336-5700

• The Star ePaper
• Subscriptions
• Manage Profile
• Change Password
• Manage Logins
• Manage Subscription
• Transaction History
• Manage Billing Info
• Manage For You
• Manage Bookmarks
• Package & Pricing

Do violent video games make young people more aggressive? Not necessarily, research suggests

• Video games

Friday, 06 Sep 2024

Related News

A blockbuster Chinese video game sparks debate on sexism in the nation’s gaming industry

Video game performers reach agreement with 80 video games on ai terms, the five biggest-selling gaming consoles.

Unsurprisingly, the study confirms that boys generally play more violent video games than girls. — AFP Relaxnews

Violent video games are often blamed for making young people more aggressive. However, a recent study conducted in the Czech Republic challenges this preconception.

According to this research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior , there is no evidence that playing violent video games increases physical aggression in adolescents.

Individuals who play violent video games do not necessarily become more aggressive, according to a study involving 3,010 Czech teenagers and titled "Does violence in video games impact aggression and empathy? A longitudinal study of Czech adolescents to differentiate within- and between-person effects”.

The paper is available via the ScienceDirect platform. "Presented findings contradict the (General Aggression Model), which posits that repeated exposure to violent content results in an increase in aggression and a decrease in empathy," the study reads.

With their findings, the researchers differentiate between two different effects: between-person effects and within-person effects. Between-person effects highlighted by the study reveal that individuals who play more violent games tend to have slightly higher scores on cognitive empathy and verbal aggression.

On the other hand, findings relating to within-person effects, which examine how changes in an individual's gaming habits affect their behaviour over time, show no significant impact of violent video games on aggression or empathy.

The study did, however, reveal some interesting nuances. For example, participants who displayed increased empathy during the third stage of data collection tended to play fewer violent video games by the fourth stage. Those who showed an increase in physical aggression in the third stage, on the other hand, tended to play more violent games in the fourth stage.

This finding could signal a possible harmful effect, but should be treated with caution, the researchers say. "The only effect observed in this context was that an increase in affective empathy is associated with a decrease in (violent video games).

“This is consistent with the selection hypothesis; however, since the effect was observed only from T3 to T4, it is possible that these effects are less stable than assumed and could change under various circumstances that were not captured in this longitudinal study focused on long-term effects (e.g., exposure patterns to other digital media, individual life events, changes in social environment)."

External factors to take into account

For the researchers, the relationship between violent video games and aggression is more complex, influenced by a combination of individual differences and contextual factors.

“In essence, while adolescents with higher general aggression may prefer [violent video games], it is not indicative that increased engagement in [violent video games] leads to heightened aggression. Therefore, much of the prior evidence may have been influenced by the higher variability present at the between-person level.

“This study underscores the imperative need to differentiate between these two levels of analysis to elucidate the genuine causal relationships between [violent video games] and aggression,” the study reads.

External factors, such as the global Covid-19 pandemic, can also influence teenage gamers' general aggressiveness.

“They may be influenced by unmeasured situational variables, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, another potential explanation could stem from the Covid-19 situation that arose during our data collection period, particularly in the impact upon the initial waves of data collection.

“This global crisis led to significant changes in behavior, notably among isolated children and adolescents, who reported increased gaming hours, especially in multiplayer games, as a coping mechanism for psychological distress and to mitigate social isolation,” the study explains.

To measure aggression, the researchers used the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire - Short Form, a recognized tool for assessing various forms of aggression, including physical and verbal aggression. Empathy was assessed using the Adolescent Measure of Empathy and Sympathy, which measures both cognitive empathy (the ability to understand the emotions of others) and affective empathy (the ability to share the emotional experiences of others).

While data collection was conducted from June 2020 to December 2022, only 1,052 people completed all four stages of the study, largely younger individuals, which may have influenced the study findings, the researchers point out.

The researchers also qualify the results by pointing out that gamers had been free to name the video games they played the most, with Minecraft topping the list, followed by Roblox , Fortnite , the GTA games and Brawl Stars .

“Despite (violent video games) not being assessed by the criticized self-report of the assessment of violence and instead by expert ratings obtained from Common Sense Media and two independent raters, it still relies on the self-reports of participants for video game names and their order. Thus, it might not be entirely reliable, because participants could omit or forget some played video games.

“Time spent in games was also not assessed. Future research should, therefore, utilize objective measurements for played video games and time spent on them,” the researchers write.

Other, previous studies have demonstrated that playing video games does not necessarily lead to violence or aggression. Some have even found positive effects in terms of mental well-being and humanitarian awareness. – AFP Relaxnews

Found a mistake in this article?

Report it to us.

Thank you for your report!

PIDM: Safeguarding Malaysia’s financial future

Next in tech news.

Trending in Tech

Air pollutant index, highest api readings, select state and location to view the latest api reading.

• Select Location

Source: Department of Environment, Malaysia

Others Also Read

Best viewed on Chrome browsers.

We would love to keep you posted on the latest promotion. Kindly fill the form below

Thank you for downloading.

We hope you enjoy this feature!

• WEATHER ALERT Dense Fog Advisory Full Story
• Live StormTracker 6 and Sky 6 Watch Now
• celebrity arrest

'Violent conduct': Miami Dolphins speak out after Tyreek Hill handcuffed on ground in traffic stop

The NFL star was detained outside of Hard Rock Stadium before his game Sunday.

MIAMI -- The NFL's Miami Dolphins franchise spoke out Monday night about the traffic stop by police officers where wide receiver Tyreek Hill was removed from his vehicle, placed on the ground and handcuffed before Sunday's season opener against the Jacksonville Jaguars.

In its statement, the organization said it was "saddened by the overly aggressive and violent conduct directed toward" Hill on Sunday, urging "swift and strong action against the officers" involved in the incident.

Hill was detained and handcuffed on the ground after being pulled over as he was driving up to Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday around 10:20 a.m. ET.

"It is both maddening and heartbreaking to watch the very people we trust to protect our community use such unnecessary force and hostility towards these players," the Dolphins' organization said.

The statement from the team follows the release of officer body camera footage of the incident by Miami-Dade Police on Monday night.

In the footage, which ABC News has reviewed, a motorcycle officer pulls over Hill and approaches the driver's side window. Hill rolls down the window and tells the officer to stop knocking on the window.

Hill then asks for his ticket and tells the officer he's going to be late before rolling the car window back up.

The officer then asks the wide receiver to roll the window down, and Hill cracks it open a little. The officer then tells Hill, "Get out of the car right now. We're not playing this game."

When Hill opens the door, the newly released footage shows the officer grabbing Hill's hand and putting it behind Hill's head. The officer then appears to drag Hill out of the car.

The videos then shows the officer putting Hill's face down on the ground with two other officers assisting. One officer has his knee on Hill's back until Hill is handcuffed, the videos show.

Approximately six minutes into the incident, body camera footage shows an assisting officer looking at Hill's ID. He can be heard saying, "You know who that is, right?"

The first officer said he didn't know and then was told Hill was one of the Dolphins' star players.

RELATED: Miami Dolphins Tyreek Hill playing hours after being detained for driving violation

In a statement from Hill's attorney, Julius B. Collins, describing the incident, Collins said Hill "had his window rolled down and that officer then demanded Mr. Hill out of the vehicle even after Mr. Hill complied with that officer's request to keep his window down."

Collins said in his statement, "Hill rolled down his window each time he was requested to do so by the requesting officers." He went on to call the officers' actions "excessive" and said they were exploring all legal remedies.

"We believe that this matter was escalated due to overzealous officers attempting to impose their authority on Mr. Hill because they were not pleased with how fast he complied with their request and that Mr. Hill did not roll down his window far enough to their liking," he added.

When asked about the incident after the game, Hill told reporters, "I wasn't disrespectful... because my mom didn't raise me that way, didn't curse, none of that."

South Florida Police Benevolent Association president Steadman Stahl released a statement Monday saying Hill's refusal to cooperate with officers led to his detainment.

"He was briefly detained for officer safety, after driving in a manner in which he was putting himself and others in great risk of danger," Stahl said. "Upon being stopped, Mr. Hill was not immediately cooperative with the officers on scene who, pursuant to policy and for their immediate safety, placed Mr. Hill in handcuffs."

Miami-Dade Police Department director Stephanie V. Daniels said in a statement along with the body camera footage Monday that the "department is committed to conducting a thorough, objective investigation into this matter."

"We will continue to update the public on the outcome of that process," Daniels said.

Daniels also said one of the officers involved was placed on "administrative duty."

Related Topics

• CELEBRITY ARREST
• MIAMI DOLPHINS
• U.S. & WORLD

Celebrity Arrest

Tyreek Hill admits some regrets, calls for officer to be fired

Former Disney Channel star Skai Jackson arrested

Rapper Nelly arrested for alleged prior incident, found with ecstasy

Justin Timberlake's license suspended in DWI arrest

Top stories.

Man drugged, sexually assaulted victims he met on dating site: DA

Mayor's town hall on proposed 76ers arena garners massive turnout

AccuWeather: Another sunny day on Thursday

Fmr. Lower Merion teacher sentenced in child porn case

Jon Bon Jovi helps talk woman off ledge of Nashville bridge: Police

Dirt bike theft, shooting leads school district to cancel class: NJSP

Philadelphia legend, soul singer Frankie Beverly dies at 77

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

NPR fact-checked the Harris-Trump presidential debate. Here's what we found

Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speak during a presidential debate. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump faced off Tuesday in their first — and possibly only — debate of the 2024 campaign, taking questions on key issues like the border, the economy and abortion.

With the candidates virtually tied in the polls, and just 55 days until Election Day, Trump and Harris sought to define their visions for America in front of a national audience and deflect attacks from the other side.

NPR reporters fact-checked the candidates' claims in real time . Here's what they found:

TRUMP: "I had no inflation, virtually no inflation. They had the highest inflation, perhaps in the history of our country, because I've never seen a worse period of time. People can't go out and buy cereal or bacon or eggs or anything else."

Inflation soared to a four-decade high of 9.1% in 2022, according to the consumer price index. While inflation has since fallen to 2.9% (as of July), prices — particularly food prices — are still higher than many Americans would like.

Other countries have also faced high inflation in the wake of the pandemic, as tangled supply chains struggled to keep pace with surging demand. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also fueled inflation by driving up energy and food prices worldwide.

Government spending in the U.S. under both the Biden-Harris administration and Trump also may have contributed, putting more money in people’s pockets and enabling them to keep spending in the face of high prices.

While high prices are a source of frustration for many Americans, the average worker has more buying power today than she did before the pandemic. Since February 2020 (just before the pandemic took hold in the U.S.), consumer prices have risen 21.6% while average wages have risen 23%.

Many prices were depressed early in the pandemic, however, so the comparison is less flattering if you start the clock when President Biden and Vice President Harris took office. Since early 2021, consumer prices have risen 19.6%, while average wages have risen 16.9%. Wage gains have been outpacing price increases for over a year, so that gap should eventually close.

— NPR economics correspondent Scott Horsley

2024 Election

Taylor swift endorses kamala harris in instagram post after the debate.

HARRIS: "Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression."

At the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the national unemployment rate was near 25%, according to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

At the start of the COVID pandemic, the unemployment rate peaked at 14.8% in April 2020, a level not seen since 1948, according to the Congressional Research Service.

But by the time Trump left office, unemployment had fallen to a lower, but still elevated, level. The January 2021 unemployment rate was 6.3%.

— NPR producer Lexie Schapitl

Immigration

TRUMP: "You see what's happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio, you look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country, and they're destroying our country. They're dangerous. They're at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out."

Trump attacked Harris and Biden's records on immigration, arguing that they're failing to stem people from other countries from entering the U.S. and causing violence.

In the last two years, more than 40,000 Venezuelan immigrants have arrived in the Denver metro area. And it is true that many now live in Aurora.

A few weeks ago, a video of gang members in an Aurora, Colo., apartment building had right-wing media declaring the city's takeover by Venezuelan gangs. NPR looked into these claims .

Indian migrants drive surge in northern U.S. border crossings

Shortly after the video appeared, Colorado's Republican Party sent a fundraising letter claiming the state is under violent attack, and Venezuelan gangs have taken over Aurora.

It's also true Aurora police have recently arrested 10 members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua. But Aurora's interim police chief, Heather Morris, says there's no evidence of a gang takeover of apartment buildings in her city.

What's more, violent crime — including murder, robbery and rape — is way down nationwide, according to the most recent data from the FBI . Notably, analysts predict violent crime rates this year will fall back down to where they were before they surged during the pandemic and may even approach a 50-year low.

Trump also claims that migrants are driving up crime rates in the U.S. That is not true. Researchers from Stanford University found that since the 1960s, immigrants have been 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found undocumented immigrants in Texas were 37% less likely to be convicted of a crime.

— NPR immigration correspondent Jasmine Garsd and criminal justice reporter Meg Anderson

TRUMP: "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there."

This remark refers to a debunked, dehumanizing claim that Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, are abducting pets and eating them .

Untangling Disinformation

Jd vance spreads debunked claims about haitian immigrants eating pets.

The claim, which local police say is baseless, first circulated among far-right activists, local Republicans and neo-Nazis before being picked up by congressional leaders, vice presidential candidate JD Vance and others. A well-known advocate for the Haitian community says she received a wave of racist harassment after Vance shared the theory on social media.

The Springfield News-Sun reported that local police said that incidents of pets being stolen or eaten were "not something that's on our radar right now." The paper said the unsubstantiated claim seems to have started with a post in a Springfield Facebook group that was widely shared across social media.

The claim is the latest example of Trump leaning into anti-immigrant rhetoric. Since entering the political arena in 2015, Trump accused immigrants of being criminals, rapists, or "poisoning the blood of our nation."

— NPR immigration correspondent Jasmine Garsd

TRUMP: "A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, [Democrats] are trying to get them to vote."

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no credible evidence that it has happened in significant numbers, or that there is an effort underway to illegally register undocumented immigrants to vote this election.

Voter registration forms require voters to sign an oath — under penalty of perjury — that they are U.S. citizens. If a noncitizen lies about their citizenship on a registration form and votes, they have created a paper trail of a crime that is punishable with jail time and deportation.

“The deterrent is incredibly strong,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told NPR.

Illegal crossings hit Biden-era low as migrants wait longer for entry

Election officials routinely verify information on voter registration forms, which ask registrants for either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed local election officials in 42 jurisdictions with high immigrant populations and found 30 cases of suspected noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast, or 0.0001%.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger launched an audit in 2022 that found fewer than 1,700 suspected noncitizens had attempted to register to vote over the past 25 years. None were able to vote.

— NPR disinformation reporter Jude Joffe-Block

TRUMP: "[Harris] was the border czar. Remember that she was the border czar."

Republicans have taken to calling Harris the "border czar" as a way to blame her for increased migration to the U.S. and what they see as border security policy failures of the Biden administration.

There is no actual "border czar" position. In 2021, President Biden tasked Harris with addressing the root causes of migration from Central America.

As Republicans attack Harris on immigration, here’s what her California record reveals

The "root causes strategy ... identifies, prioritizes, and coordinates actions to improve security, governance, human rights, and economic conditions in the region," the White House said in a statement. "It integrates various U.S. government tools, including diplomacy, foreign assistance, public diplomacy, and sanctions."

While Harris has been scrutinized on the right, immigration advocates have also criticized Harris, including for comments in 2021 where she warned prospective migrants, "Do not come."

TRUMP: "You could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month, and probably after birth."

As ABC News anchor Linsey Davis mentioned during her real-time fact check, there is no state where it is legal to kill a baby after birth (Trump called it "execution"). A report from KFF earlier this year also noted that abortions “after birth” are illegal in every state.

According to the Pew Research Center, the overwhelming majority of abortions — 93% — take place during the first trimester. Pew says 1% take place after 21 weeks. Most of those take place before 24 weeks, the approximate timeline for fetal viability, according to a report by KFF Health News.

Trump repeats the false claim that Democrats support abortion 'after birth' in debate

A separate analysis from KFF earlier this year noted that later abortions are expensive to obtain and offered by relatively few providers, and often occur because of medical complications or because patients face barriers earlier in their pregnancies.

“Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That isn’t happening; it’s insulting to the women of America,” Harris said.

Harris also invoked religion in her response, arguing that “one does not have to abandon their faith” to agree that the government should not control reproductive health decisions.

As Davis also noted, Trump has offered mixed messages about abortion over the course of the campaign. He has bragged about his instrumental role in overturning Roe v. Wade , while appearing to backpedal on an issue that polling makes clear is a liability for Republicans.

— NPR political correspondent Sarah McCammon

Afghanistan

TRUMP: The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan "was one of the most incompetently handled situations anybody has ever seen."

Trump and Republicans in Congress say President Biden is to blame for the fall of Kabul to the Taliban three years ago, and the chaotic rush at the airport where 13 U.S. troops died in a suicide bomb attack that killed nearly 200 Afghan civilians trying to flee. Of late, Republicans have been emphasizing Harris’ role . But the Afghanistan war spanned four U.S. presidencies , and it's important to note that it was the Trump administration that signed a peace deal that was basically a quick exit plan.

Trump regularly claims there were no casualties in Afghanistan for 18 months under his administration, and it’s not true, according to Pentagon records.

— NPR veterans correspondent Quil Lawrence

Military policy

HARRIS: “There is not one member of the military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world for the first time this century.”

This is a common administration talking point, and it's technically true. But thousands of troops in Iraq and on the Syrian border are still in very dangerous terrain. U.S. troops died in Jordan in January on a base that keeps watch over the war with ISIS in Syria.

HARRIS: "I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president United States, and in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the inflation Reduction Act which opened new leases for fracking."

When she first ran for president in 2019, Harris had said she was firmly in favor of banning fracking — a stance she later abandoned when she joined President Biden’s campaign as his running mate.

In an interview with CNN last month, Harris attempted to explain why her position has changed from being against fracking to being in favor of it.

“What I have seen is that we can grow, and we can increase a clean energy economy without banning fracking,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash.

Harris says she won't ban fracking. What to know about the controversial topic

Under the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S. produced a record amount of oil last year — averaging 12.9 million barrels per day. That eclipsed the previous record of 12.3 million barrels per day, set under Trump in 2019. 2023 was also a record year for domestic production of natural gas . Much of the domestic boom in oil and gas production is the result of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” techniques .

In addition to record oil and gas production, the Biden-Harris administration has also coincided with rapid growth of solar and wind power . Meanwhile, coal has declined as a source of electricity.

Health care

TRUMP: "I had a choice to make: Do I save [the Affordable Care Act] and make it as good as it can be, or do I let it rot? And I saved it."

During his presidency, Trump undermined the Affordable Care Act in many ways — for instance, by slashing funding for advertising and free "navigators" who help people sign up for a health insurance plan on HealthCare.gov. And rather than deciding to "save" the ACA, he tried hard to get Congress to repeal it, and failed. When pushed Tuesday on what health policy he would put in its place, he said he has "concepts of a plan."

Shots - Health News

Amid medicaid's 'unwinding,' many states work to expand health care access.

The Biden administration has reversed course from Trump's management of the Affordable Care Act. Increased subsidies have made premiums more affordable in the marketplaces, and enrollment has surged. The uninsurance rate has dropped to its lowest point ever during the Biden administration.

The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010 and is entrenched in the health care system. Republicans successfully ran against Obamacare for about a decade, but it has faded as a campaign issue this year.

— NPR health policy correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin