Insensitive Players? A Relationship Between Violent Video Game Exposure and Recognition of Negative Emotions

An ability to accurately recognize negative emotions in others can initiate pro-social behavior and prevent anti-social actions. Thus, it remains of an interest of scholars studying effects of violent video games. While exposure to such games was linked to slower emotion recognition, the evidence regarding accuracy of emotion recognition among players of violent games is weak and inconsistent. The present research investigated the relationship between violent video game exposure (VVGE) and accuracy of negative emotion recognition. We assessed the level of self-reported VVGE in hours per day and the accuracy of the recognition using the Facial Expressions Matching Test. The results, with adolescents (Study 1; N = 67) and with adults (Study 2; N = 151), showed that VVGE was negatively related to accurate recognition of negative emotion expressions, even if controlled for age, gender, and trait empathy, but no causal direction could be assessed. In line with the violent media desensitization model, our findings suggest that higher self-reported VVGE relates to lower recognition of negative emotional expressions of other people. On the one hand, such lower recognition of negative emotions may underlie inaccurate reactions in real-life social situations. On the other hand, lower sensitivity to social cues may help players to better focus on their performance in a violent game.

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Insensitive Players? A Relationship between Violent Video Game Exposure and Recognition of Negative Emotions

10.31234/osf.io/g7buq ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Ewa Miedzobrodzka ◽

Jacek Buczny ◽

Elly Konijn ◽

Lydia Krabbendam

Keyword(s):

Emotion Recognition ◽

Video Game ◽

Negative Emotions ◽

Real Life ◽

Lower Sensitivity ◽

Social Situations ◽

Violent Video Game ◽

Matching Test ◽

The Relationship ◽

Pro Social Behavior

An ability to accurately recognize negative emotions in others can initiate pro-social behavior and prevent anti-social actions. For that reason, it remains of an interest of scholars studying effects of violent video games. While exposure to such games was linked to slower emotion recognition, the evidence regarding accuracy of emotion recognition among players of violent games is weak and inconsistent. The present research investigated the relationship between violent video game exposure (VVGE) and accuracy of recognition of negative emotions. We measured the level of VVGE in hours per day and the accuracy of emotion recognition using the Facial Expressions Matching Test. The results of two studies, with adolescents (Study 1; N = 67) and with adults (Study 2; N = 151), showed that VVGE was negatively related to accurate recognition of negative emotions, even if controlled for age, gender, and trait empathy. In line with violent media desensitization model, our findings suggest that higher VVGE relates to lower recognition of negative emotional expressions of other people. On one hand, such lower recognition of negative emotions may underlie inaccurate reactions in real-life social situations. On the other hand, lower sensitivity to social cues may help players to better focus on their performance in a violent game.

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The Hitman Study

European Psychologist ◽

10.1027/1016-9040/a000010 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 99-108 ◽

Cited By ~ 76

Author(s):

Christopher J. Ferguson ◽

Stephanie M. Rueda

Keyword(s):

Experimental Study ◽

Young Adults ◽

Aggressive Behavior ◽

Video Game ◽

Real Life ◽

Mood Management ◽

Video Game Play ◽

Video Game Playing ◽

Violent Video Game ◽

The Social

This article explores commonly discussed theories of violent video game effects: the social learning, mood management, and catharsis hypotheses. An experimental study was carried out to examine violent video game effects. In this study, 103 young adults were given a frustration task and then randomized to play no game, a nonviolent game, a violent game with good versus evil theme (i.e., playing as a good character taking on evil), or a violent game in which they played as a “bad guy.” Results indicated that randomized video game play had no effect on aggressive behavior; real-life violent video game-playing history, however, was predictive of decreased hostile feelings and decreased depression following the frustration task. Results do not support a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior, but do suggest that violent games reduce depression and hostile feelings in players through mood management.

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The effects of realistic controller and real-life exposure to gun on psychology of violent video game players

Proceedings of the 5th International Confernece on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication - ICUIMC '11 ◽

10.1145/1968613.1968673 ◽

2011 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Ki Joon Kim ◽

Frank Biocca ◽

Eui Jun Jeong

Keyword(s):

Video Game ◽

Real Life ◽

Violent Video Game ◽

Game Players

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Investigating the Role of Culture on Negative Emotion Expressions in the Wild

Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience ◽

10.3389/fnint.2021.699667 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 ◽

Author(s):

Emma Hughson ◽

Roya Javadi ◽

James Thompson ◽

Angelica Lim

Keyword(s):

Emotion Recognition ◽

North American ◽

Affective Computing ◽

Negative Emotion ◽

Negative Emotions ◽

Support Vector ◽

Data Sets ◽

Social Signals ◽

Data Set ◽

In The Wild

Even though culture has been found to play some role in negative emotion expression, affective computing research primarily takes on a basic emotion approach when analyzing social signals for automatic emotion recognition technologies. Furthermore, automatic negative emotion recognition systems still train data that originates primarily from North America and contains a majority of Caucasian training samples. As such, the current study aims to address this problem by analyzing what the differences are of the underlying social signals by leveraging machine learning models to classify 3 negative emotions, contempt, anger and disgust (CAD) amongst 3 different cultures: North American, Persian, and Filipino. Using a curated data set compiled from YouTube videos, a support vector machine (SVM) was used to predict negative emotions amongst differing cultures. In addition a one-way ANOVA was used to analyse the differences that exist between each culture group in-terms of level of activation of underlying social signal. Our results not only highlighted the significant differences in the associated social signals that were activated for each culture, but also indicated the specific underlying social signals that differ in our cross-cultural data sets. Furthermore, the automatic classification methods showed North American expressions of CAD to be well-recognized, while Filipino and Persian expressions were recognized at near chance levels.

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Violent video game players and non-players differ on facial emotion recognition

Aggressive Behavior ◽

10.1002/ab.21602 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 16-28 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Ruth L. Diaz ◽

Ulric Wong ◽

David C. Hodgins ◽

Carina G. Chiu ◽

Vina M. Goghari

Keyword(s):

Emotion Recognition ◽

Video Game ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Violent Video Game ◽

Game Players

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Violent video game play impacts facial emotion recognition

Aggressive Behavior ◽

10.1002/ab.20191 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 33 (4) ◽

pp. 353-358 ◽

Cited By ~ 40

Author(s):

Steven J. Kirsh ◽

Jeffrey R.W. Mounts

Keyword(s):

Emotion Recognition ◽

Video Game ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Game Play ◽

Video Game Play ◽

Violent Video Game

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People regulate each other’s emotion regulation

10.31234/osf.io/abq3v ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Corey Cusimano ◽

Geoffrey Goodwin

Keyword(s):

Emotion Regulation ◽

Cognitive Control ◽

Negative Emotion ◽

Negative Emotions ◽

Real Life ◽

Emotion Control ◽

Self Reports ◽

University Policies ◽

General Capacity

People often observe others struggling with and attempting to regulate their negative emotions. But, rather than always offering sympathy and help, observers sometimes criticize others for feeling upset, thereby making them suffer even more. Why would observers react to suffering others in this way? Across six studies, we show that observers’ use criticism to spur sufferers to regulate their negative emotions away on their own. Consistent with this goal, observers base their supportive or critical reactions on whether they think the sufferer is capable of controlling their negative emotion (i.e., of regulating it away). Observers rely on a variety of cues to determine whether a person has control over their suffering. First, observers rely on their own sense of how much control they have over their own emotions (Study 1). Second, they judge emotions that are miscalibrated to the situation as being more controllable than emotions that are well-calibrated (Studies 2-4). And third, they incorporate information about the sufferer’s general capacity to exert cognitive control over his or her emotions (Study 4). Judgments about others’ emotion control extend to real-life contexts: They predict self-reports of supportive and critical behaviors towards close others (Study 5) and they predict support for university policies aimed at reducing the prevalence of microaggressions (Study 6). Taken together, our findings suggest that people engage in emotion regulation regulation, in which they expect and enforce others to regulate their own emotions if they can, and track features of the person or situation that enable successful emotion regulation.

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Interactive Experience and Identification as Predictors of Attributing Responsibility in Video Games

Journal of Media Psychology Theories Methods and Applications ◽

10.1027/1864-1105/a000168 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 3-15

Author(s):

Nathan Walter ◽

Yariv Tsfati

Keyword(s):

Video Game ◽

Psychological Research ◽

External Factors ◽

Theoretical Expectation ◽

Main Character ◽

Attribution Of Responsibility ◽

Attributions Of Responsibility ◽

Violent Video Game ◽

Grand Theft Auto Iv ◽

Interactive Experience

Abstract. This study examines the effect of interactivity on the attribution of responsibility for the character’s actions in a violent video game. Through an experiment, we tested the hypothesis that identification with the main character in Grand Theft Auto IV mediates the effect of interactivity on attributions of responsibility for the main character’s antisocial behavior. Using the framework of the fundamental attribution error, we demonstrated that those who actually played the game, as opposed to those who simply watched someone else playing it, identified with the main character. In accordance with the theoretical expectation, those who played the game and came to identify with the main character attributed the responsibility for his actions to external factors such as “living in a violent society.” By contrast, those who did not interact with the game attributed responsibility for the character’s actions to his personality traits. These findings could be viewed as contrasting with psychological research suggesting that respondents should have distanced themselves from the violent protagonist rather than identifying with him, and with Iyengar’s (1991) expectation that more personalized episodic framing would be associated with attributing responsibility to the protagonist.

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