Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing

The concept of artificially depicted emotions and their effect on emotional development has been a particularly hot button issue within the last few decades. The main driving force behind this topic of general research interest seems to be what the effect of modern technology have been on human, social interactions. The advent of the internet has allowed for humans to interact with each other more and more distantly which has continually raised questions of the neural value of social interactions held via the internet,

Video games have been an even more specified area of focus within this topic as well because most people seem to make the assumption that increased exposure to artificial violence from video games is likely to cause you to be more prone to violent outbursts in your life outside of video games. Laura Stockdale’s article titled: “Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during face processing” describes a study she and her colleagues conducted in order to elucidate the nature of the relationship between media violence exposure and increased aggression as well as decreased prosocial behavior. The results of this study showed that short-term exposure to violent film can lead to emotional anesthetization or a reduction in cognitive resources allocated to processing emotional face expression.

            As of very recently it has been proposed that mothers who have undergone extensive rhinoplastic surgery, reduce their ability to facially communicate emotion. This hypothesis, although untested, makes the claim that infants whose mothers have had extensive rhinoplastic surgery have a diminished ability to process emotional face expressions and therefore develop an atypical sense of empathy and sympathy and a diminished ability to relate to other people. Often in scientific research, if a particular topic doesn’t have enough prior evidentiary support, the topic will remain unexplored until some researcher manages to make a substantiated claim that their hypothesis is worth testing. Although it would be incredibly difficult to create research circumstances in which it be possible to assess the role or lack thereof facial emotional indicators, it still seems like a subject worth exploring.

References

Stockdale, L. A., Morrison, R.G., Kmiecik, M.J., Garbarino, J., & Silton, R.L. (2015) Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during face processing.