Violent video games have become increasingly popular in recent years, and it is difficult to escape the controversy that surrounds violent games such as Halo and Call of Duty. Various studies have attempted to link video game violence with increased aggression in youth, emotional numbing, and decreased empathy among gamers. However, there are numerous factors hindering the ability to come to a strong, data-driven conclusion on the effect of violent video games on people as a whole. The effect of the violence varies across each individual and depends on the type and duration of the gaming experience (Weber et al., 2009). Furthermore, there are several behaviors such as aggression, empathy, and pro-social behavior that could be measured to evaluate the effect of video game violence. Experiments are limited in their ability to control for all of these variables in an individual, and to assess across all of these complex behavioral outputs. As a result, research has been published both supporting and rejecting the influence of violent games on our behavior. Due to the difficulty of designing an experiment and collecting data to assess the effect of violence in games on an individual as a whole, it is much more reasonable to assess the influence of violence in gaming across one behavioral output, such as the influence of violence in gaming on empathy.
Dr. Stockdale and colleagues designed a study to evaluate the effect of violent video games on emotional processing in both frequent and infrequent gamers. This experiment used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure neural activity in response to emotional facial expressions. The researchers concluded a significant relationship indicating lower empathy scores for frequent gamers (Stockdale et al., 2017). Furthermore, this study revealed a reduced P100 event-related-potential in frequent gamers with low empathy. The amplitude of this waveform measured by EEG has been cited to correspond with the level of attention to emotional facial expression. The conclusion of this experiment, which presents a strong argument for the effect of violence on empathy, is corroborated by another study which shows the complementary affect using positive valence. In this study conducted at the University of Innsbruck, participants engaged in a pro-social video game directly before being scored on an empathy scale. Participants that played the positive, pro-social game showed a significant increase in empathy scores when compared to participants playing a neutral game (Greitemeyer et al., 2010). While this study does not provide a neural basis for their result, it does support the idea presented by Stockdale. Both studies argue that emotional valence of a video game is linked to emotional processing of the participants, specifically empathy.
Dr. Stockdale and Greitemeyer make a strong case for the negative effects of violent video games and their potential effects on empathy, however other studies have not arrived at this conclusion. In an article titled “Lack of Evidence That Neural Empathic Responses Are Blunted in Excessive Users of Violent Video Games: An fMRI Study,” researchers did not observe any differences in activation patterns linked to empathy between gamers and non-gamers when viewing emotional images (Szycik et al., 2017). A separate study by Kühn and colleagues was conducted in a longitudinal design to eliminate priori differences between games and non-gamers. They arrived at the same conclusion, where participants in the gaming group and non-gaming group did not show differences in brain activity from fMRI when viewing emotional images after 16 weeks in their respective condition (Kühn et al., 2018).
Even though all of these studies were assessing empathy in some form, it is possible that these methodological differences such as the use of fMRI vs EEG can account for differing conclusions. As previously stated, differences in individuals as well as differences in experimental design make tackling this issue very difficult. It is likely that both individual differences and frequency of gaming mediate the observed effects of violent gaming on empathy.
References
Greitemeyer, T., Osswald, S., & Brauer, M. (2010). Playing prosocial video games increases empathy and decreases schadenfreude. Emotion, 10(6), 796–802. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020194
Kühn, S., Kugler, D., Schmalen, K., Weichenberger, M., Witt, C., & Gallinat, J. (2018). The Myth of Blunted Gamers: No Evidence for Desensitization in Empathy for Pain after a Violent Video Game Intervention in a Longitudinal fMRI Study on Non-Gamers. Neurosignals, 26(1), 22–30. https://doi.org/10.1159/000487217
Stockdale, L., Morrison, R. G., Palumbo, R., Garbarino, J., & Silton, R. L. (2017). Cool, callous and in control: Superior inhibitory control in frequent players of video games with violent content. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(12), 1869–1880. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx115
Szycik, G. R., Mohammadi, B., Münte, T. F., & te Wildt, B. T. (2017). Lack of Evidence That Neural Empathic Responses Are Blunted in Excessive Users of Violent Video Games: An fMRI Study. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00174
Weber, R., Behr, K.-M., Tamborini, R., Ritterfeld, U., & Mathiak, K. (2009). What Do We Really Know About First-Person-Shooter Games? An Event-Related, High-Resolution Content Analysis. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(4), 1016–1037. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01479.x
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