Proven negative effects of violent video games in common and uncommon studies

Studies done to record the effects of video games usually go as such: randomly selected subjects within certain age groups are collected and made to play certain video games and studying the immediate effects upon the subject's personality and social behavior. They study the effects with questions after the playing of the game. 

 

A study conducted by Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman conducted a basic, meta-analytic study on those who play video games. Studies such as this one look for correlations between aggression and playing violent video games. They found that “short-term exposure to violent video games causes at least a temporary increase in aggression.” (Anderson, Effects of violent video games....).

Another study employed a situation where the person asking the questions dropped a pencil, and recorded whether or not the subject picked it up or not. If the subject helped out with the pens, it was considered a prosocial act. According to the study by Morgan J. Tear et al., “[s]ignificantly more participants who played the prosocial game helped gather the pens (67%) than participants who played the violent game (28%) or the neutral game (33%).” Violent games are, so far, not affecting subjects in a good way.

While employing an MRI machine, Chris Montag studies his subjects' brain activity. Using an fMRI, he reads the subjects' reactions through their brain waves when they are shown different pictures, some from the popular first-person-shooter (FPS) Counterstrike, ranging from pleasant pictures to unpleasant, violent pictures. “[T]he unpleasant ... pictures might not have only produced negative emotions in all participants of our study but also triggered a cognitive defense mechanism in the control persons to repress unwanted negative emotions,” asserts Montag. He is worried that exposure to violent scenes portrayed in violent video games dampen emotional responses to disturbing scenes. It is the nature of any living thing to adapt to its surroundings, even humans. If we are exposed to scenes of death that we create via our video game controllers, would we get used to such an action or scene?