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Study Suggests Violent Video Games May Make Teens Less Violent

Posted by Soulskill on from the rovio-cancels-development-on-melancholy-birds dept.

barlevg writes "A new paper is out in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence which shows no positive correlation between playing violent video games and acts of aggression. The study of 377 children with attention deficit and depressive symptoms in fact showed a slight negative correlation between video game-playing and aggressive behavior such as bullying, which the researchers posit is due to the games awarding some measure of catharsis. The full paper is available online (PDF)."

5 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. No relationship, not negative relationship by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The stats in the study show no significant relationship, not a negative relationship. The regression coefficient happens to be negative, but the coefficient isn't significantly related to the dependent variable (bullying). You should change your headline.

    1. Re:No relationship, not negative relationship by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No significant relationship also bolsters the current position that catharsis is bullshit.

      Catharsis is only one hypothesis for why video games reduce crime. A more plausible one is the "sucking up time" hypothesis. Every hour that kids spend playing games, is one less hour they are out on the street. When "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" was released, there was a noticeable drop in real world crime for several weeks. The most plausible explanation was that the potential criminals were at home playing.

  2. Never agreed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Never agreed that violent video games make a person more violent. I've been playing FPS since I was a child with my first being Wolfenstein 3D right when it came out. I also listen to heavy metal. For me it's actually relaxing. Nothing I like more after a stressful day than sitting down and shooting someone in the face.

  3. Amazing! by onyxruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who would have thought that giving kids a safe environment to get their aggression out would have beneficial side effects? The said thing is that this study ever had to be conducted in the first place.

    I remember when D&D was blamed for suicides, goths were blamed for school shootings, movies were blamed for just about everything and so on. At some point the idiot brigade needs to quit blaming everyone else and go back to being parents instead of outsourcing the job to the media. /rant off

  4. Re:TL;DR by Nemyst · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If there wasn't any movement towards restricting the distribution and sales of games, if we didn't constantly get games being censored for content deemed too violent or too gross (games targeted at adults no less!), if we didn't see all the blatant misinformation being circulated by the media concerning games and violence, then yeah, it wouldn't be news.

    As is, the point needs to be hammered home as much as possible if we're to keep the medium on an equal footing to all other media.