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Study Suggests Violent Video Games May Make Teens Less Violent
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)."
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.
Games are a good outlet for stress and frustration. I'd argue a game is a constructive activity as there are things you can learn from video games.
Of course they make people less violent.
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.
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
In other news, Jack Thompson's body was found in Florida. Apparently his head had exploded. A copy of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence was found on his desk.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Is 377 sufficient? What is an adequate sample size? How do you determine what the sample size should be?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
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.
They're doing a bunch of regression analyses and summarising their results using tables. Not a graph in sight. I have to trawl through the text to find R values. Impossible to really evaluate their data. If a student produced this stuff I'd fail them.
soylentnews.org
See, you'd think that, but then look at some of the fire arm stats: http://www.factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/
Basicly it shows that firearm sales went up and the number of firearm related murders, assaults and robberies went down.
Then look at the number of deaths in other categories such as drunk driving or just driving in general: http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/causes-of-death-cartoon.jpg
Long story short (too late), people like to focus on the little things and blow them out of proportion while completely ignoring the larger issues or ignoring the fact that the majority of people get along just fine.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Somehow I doubt the contributors to "Journal of Youth and Adolescence" are focused experts in human aggression. I similarly wouldn't put much confidence in any paper they published regarding how well children are able to code complex database applications.
The US Military has a large body of research they've conducted over the past 60 years in exactly how to cultivate and control aggression in youths, which is why our soldiers are some of the most lethal on the planet. They also have a similarly large body of research on how to inhibit it -- its instructive how relatively few war crimes have been committed by US Soldiers over the past decade in our many myriad wars.
My layman's summary of their research? Video games are excellent training simulators for violence, but don't actually cause aggression. Aggression is cultivated/controlled through supervised training (or lack thereof). Very similar to Milgram's findings in the 60s.
Dave Grossman's books do a pretty good job of explaining this research in an relatively accessible way.
Idle hands are the devils work.
This expression has been in existence in one form or another since before Shakespeare.
For most of the 20th century, every new form of entertainment/recreation/young people hangout was blamed for the ills of society by the older generation.
I bet the same people blaming violent video games for today's problems probably grew up in an era where their parents and grandparents were rallying against Rock Music and Pinball Parlors and such.
To steal a quote from Wikipedia about my favorite Moral Panic:
In the 1771 German novel Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim by Sophie von La Roche, a high-minded character complains about the newly introduced waltz among aristocrats thus: "But when he put his arm around her, pressed her to his breast, cavorted with her in the shameless, indecent whirling-dance of the Germans and engaged in a familiarity that broke all the bounds of good breeding - then my silent misery turned into burning rage."
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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.