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People who love playing violent video games are at risk of having their minds distorted to the point of seeing their world differently. This is according to a new psychological study that was published on 18th, December, 2018 in the Journal of Visual Cognition.
The research was done jointly by Dr Steve Most from UNSW Psychology who is also a cognitive psychologist, Dr Kim Curby a colleague from Macquarie University and UNSW PhD student Sandersan Onie. The key aim of this study was to investigate how an individual’s video gaming behavior predicted whether he or she will be emotionally affected to the point of having emotion-induced blindness.
The study involved two groups of people; those who were playing violent video games (those who were playing for over 5 hours a week) and those who were not playing video games at all. Important, no participant was made aware of the study and his or her video game playing behavior.
The actual experiment involved participants being shown a flashing series of 17 images at 100 milliseconds per image. The image stream comprised of an amalgamation of upright landscape photos. Among these images was a ‘target image’ which was essentially a landscape target rotated at 90 degrees to the right or left.
The participants were required to point the direction at which the target image was being rotated to as they were viewing the image stream.
Within the sequence of these images was a ‘distractor’ image which was appearing approximately 200 or 400 milliseconds prior to the rotated target. This image could either be an emotional neutral (non-threatening person or animal) or an emotionally negative or graphic content which could relay violence of one form or another (such as dirty toilet bowls or assault, crime etc).
The research established that violent video game players were least affected by emotional disruptors, that is image streams that harbored disgusting or violent distracters. Furthermore, these groups of people were able to rightly identify the rotated targeted with greater precision. This is irrespective of the fact that the image contained graphic content.
However, there was no notable variation in accuracy between the two groups for the image streams that contained only neutral images. This rules out the possibility that violent video game players simply paid better attention generally. According to Dr Most, the lead researcher, these findings suggest that depending on the context, individuals with different degree of game and violent media consumption can as well have different views of the environment.
Dr Most continues to explain that we established that a high level of violent video game playing was directly associated with less sensitivity to emotional images. Therefore, who were playing had a capability of preserving their perceptions of other things around their environment. These findings generally provide a connection between violent video game exposure and an individual’s perception, that is, the way they process information in their minds.
