Video Games and the Brain.
Game controller.
by Angela Spivey
Can the things we watch really change our behavior? A Carolina researcher has shown that heavy playing of violent video games results in an actual physical change in the brain.
Marc Sestir, a doctoral candidate in social psychology, worked with then-Carolina faculty member Bruce Bartholow (now of the University of Missouri-Columbia) to study reactions to various images among undergraduates who said they regularly played violent video games and those who said they did not. Some of the images were neutral. Others were negative but nonviolent, such as a child with an eye tumor. Others depicted violence, such as a knife being held to a woman’s throat.
The researchers measured the participants’ P300 brain waves, which occur about three-tenths of a second after someone sees an image or object. “The bigger the spike in P300 waves, the more attention your brain is paying to the image,” Sestir says. “You show a bigger spike when you perceive something as unusual or disturbing.”
The participants who played a lot of violent video games showed a smaller spike in P300 waves when they viewed the violent images. “They viewed a picture of a guy with a gun in his mouth pretty similarly to the way they viewed a lamp or a chair,” Sestir says. “They’re more numb to it. They don’t see it as being as disturbing as people who don’t play violent games do.
“Playing these video games does produce some sort of basic physiological change, but we don’t know what effects that has for the average player,” Sestir says. “The idea is not that violent video games will cause anyone to be a violent killer. But violent video game playing may enable violence to a greater degree. Which may mean nothing for most people. But we’re worried that, for a minority of people, playing these games may incline them more toward serious acts of violence.”
This study was published July 2006 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Angela Spivey is a freelance writer based in Fayetteville, N.C.
