Stockdale and colleagues (2015) follow up on previous research that suggests that exposure to violent media desensitizes an individual’s processing of emotional input, which may lead to increased hostility, decreased sympathy, and decreased prosocial behaviors. In this study, researchers exposed participants to either a nonviolent or violent video stimulus and then recorded EEG data while the participant completed an implicit emotion task. Stockdale and colleagues found that participants exposed to violent film showed decreased frontal central P200 amplitude regardless of the emotion displayed in front of them. This suggests that these participants spent less cognitive effort in processing facial emotion, and thus needed to spend less cognitive effort to inhibit behavior in response to emotion. This need for less cognitive resources supports the hypothesis that exposure to violent media desensitizes individuals to emotion.
New research is looking to differentiate between passive observance of violent media in film versus active engagement with violence in video games. With the rise of virtual reality games and choose-your-own-adventure media such as Netflix’s “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch”, new technology is allowing consumers to hold greater agency in creating and reacting to fictional narratives. Of particular interest is the prevalence of violence in this new interactive media: how will personal choice in violent simulations affect subsequent behavior?
Jung and colleagues (2011) examined physiological arousal and aggressive cognition between participants who either watched violent media, played a violent game, or observed someone playing a violent game. Results show that playing a violent video game compared to watching violent media or observing someone else play a violent game increases aggressive cognition – measured by reaction time to negative words – and increased levels of presence and physiological arousal. The authors hypothesize that the agency creates a heightened presence and physiological arousal in the individual, and subsequently may lead to priming of aggressive cognitions.
A study by Lagrange and colleagues (2019) used an interactive story task with low or highly violent action options and measured the participant’s satisfaction with the story outcome. In their design, participants were given a narrative and were asked to make two choices that lead to a possible one of six outcomes. The first choice was either no violence, slight violence, or high violence; the second choice was either an apology (no violence) or high violence. The researchers found that participants who only made violent choices rated higher satisfaction with the story outcomes than participants who made no violent choices. In a follow-up study, Lagrange and colleagues found that participants who merely read the highly violent stories and had no agency in choice reported significant less satisfaction with the story. The researchers conclude that it is agency in choosing violence that increases enjoyment of a violent storyline.
There are currently no studies that relate agency in violent simulations to the underlying desensitized cognitive emotional processing. With Jung et al. (2011) and Lagrange et al. (2019) in mind, it would be interesting to see how agency in violent simulations affects cognitive processing of emotion. Could the need to react to emotions or situations in a game lead to more accurate and faster identification of fearful emotion than passive observance of violence? Perhaps it is the acceptance of their violent choices, reflected by higher ratings of satisfaction, that leads to suppression of any information that would conflict with desensitization to pain and suffering and trigger feelings of guilt? With new technologies becoming more realistic and granting their consumers more agency in violent narratives, more research is necessary to determine how personal choice in violence influences desensitization to emotion and the production of violent behavior.
References
Jung, Y., Skoric, M., Kwon, J. H., & Detenber, B. (2011). Watching vs. playing: effects of violent media on presence, physiological arousal and aggressive cognitions [Paper presentation]. The International Society for Presence Research Annual Conference, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Retrieved from https://astro.temple.edu/~lombard/ISPR/Proceedings/2011/Jung_etal.pdf
Lagrange, V., Hiskes, B., Woodward, C., Li, B., & Breithaupt, F. (2019). Choosing and enjoying violence in narratives. Plos One, 14(12). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226503
Stockdale, L. A., Morrison, R. G., Kmiecik, M. J., Garbarino, J., & Silton, R. L. (2015). Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10(10), 1373–1382. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsv025
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