Brain Changes When Viewing Violent Media 448
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Scientists at Columbia University have used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to show that a brain network responsible for suppressing inappropriate or unwarranted aggressive behaviors became less active after study subjects watched several short clips from popular movies depicting acts of violence. These changes could render people less able to control their own aggressive behavior. Although research has shown some correlation between exposure to media violence and real-life violent behavior, there has been little direct neuroscientific support for this theory until now. 'Depictions of violent acts have become very common in the popular media,' said researcher Christopher Kelly. 'Our findings demonstrate for the first time that watching media depictions of violence does influence processing in parts of the brain that control behaviors like aggression.' The full research paper is published on the The Public Library of Science, a peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication, that publishes all its articles under a Creative Commons Attribution License."
Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Bull I play video games all the time. (Score:3, Insightful)
So here is a question. How does it effect younger people?
Or what is the effect if the media is interactive in nature?
I am just waiting to see what excuese the "Video games don't contribute to violence" lobby will have to say about this.
OK... but (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like therapists use certain interactive video imagery programs to help people with extreme phobias. If you have severe arachnophobia, but spend several hours every day interacting with realistic spiders in an simulated environment, you will be less likely to have a panic attack when confronted with a real-world spider. This is a long-documented psychologically valid method.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cumulative (Score:2, Insightful)
In America, everything we watch has violence. You can't get away from it - go ahead, try to! (God forbid if a women's nipple is shown! Think of the children! It's OK for them to see someone get shot, though.)
What I'm trying to say is, we're constantly seeing violent images. Yeah, if you just saw that one movie or played that one game and then went into a monastery, sure the effects may not last that long. But I think that the researchers are confusing long term effects with cumulative effects.
Let's face it, we're in a violent and hostile society. The signs are all over the place: road rage, shootings, media content - violence sells after all!, how people interact in everyday situations, etc...
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bull I play video games all the time. (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point the video game violence issue is the same as whether we as a country should have laws banning homosexual activity, and whether we should ban alcohol consumption. Do we want freedom or an authoritarian state?
Note that alcohol consumption contributes to a *lot* more harm every year than video games and I support the right to consume alcohol.
Re:lowers inhibitions (Score:1, Insightful)
"Lowers inhibitions" does not move you to some absolute state. It moves you down from wherever you would have been otherwise. In short, you may have downgraded yourself from a zen master to a hippie by corrupting your mind with those movies.
Re:Did it ever occur to anyone (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, there is a difference between "The Miracle of Life" and Ross dogging Rachel from behind while she gives him a "Reach-Under" with Chandler screaming, "Could that BE any freakier?".
Re:Bull I play video games all the time. (Score:5, Insightful)
People say that parents should control what there kids watch and play but then why restrict tobacco and alcohol? Shouldn't parents control what kids drink and smoke?
The media companies don't want any real restrictions because just like the Tobacco companies all they care about is money. Any pretense that they care about freedom is just spin.
Hey I like to play Quake just as much as the next person but how the fanboys on Slashdot fall for media compaines freedom flag waving for profit just makes me nuts.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
so when they look back and say "When I was a kid, nobody went crazy" it doesn't exactly apply to current games, Also anecdotal evidence is almost always wrong.
Re:Bull I play video games all the time. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have never known a kid who couldn't have figured out how to buy tobacco either.
So have you ever known a kid who couldn't get his hands on booze or smokes if he/she wanted? What do you expect to accomplish here?
The only argument for alcohol laws regarding minors is that it allows an additional charge of minor in possession to be made for underage persons with such beverages. Are you prepared to do the same with video games?
Secondly restricting sales of video games (which are nonconsumable) is very different than restricting sales of alcoholic beverages. If my friend gets his parents to buy some violent video game, he gains more by sharing it with me than by using it all himself. This is very different than alcohol where the good in question is *gone* after it is used. So how do you expect to enforce this? Make it a crime for kids to play such video games with eachother (just as with alcohol)?
Hence this isn't just a matter of parental control. The only way such a thing can work is if there are *legal consequences* to exposing minors to such material which makes it a case far more like the question of pornography than like alcohol. Do you really want our society to have crimes like "exposing a minor to violent depictions in movies?"
Finally, I would say that neurological information gleaned from these reports is important, but you can't get from it any information which suggests that there is a sufficient social harm to abridge the freedoms we hold dear in ways that would actually make such measures have any real teeth.
Its called thinking. (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesnt mean its negative or positive response, that would still be up to the individual.
Re:What they proved... (Score:1, Insightful)
What it shows is that a region of the brain which is active during the suppression of certain behaviors is less active after viewing violent media. This is a correlation with a causation. There is a correlation between activity in a region of the brain and the suppression of violent behavior, and watching violent media then causes reduced activity in this part of the brain.
This does NOT, however, show that viewing violent media induces violent behavior, or more importantly, induces a sustained pattern of violent behavior. Showing activity in a region of the brain is not "the real deal", because the brain is an extremely complex network of interactions which are very poorly understood, and you cannot consistently take activity in only one region and deduce the behavioral consequence of that.
The ACTUAL evidence is perfectly fine. People are disturbed by the extravagant conclusions being extrapolated from the evidence. There are a large volume of people who want very much to prove that violent movies and games cause people to become violent criminals, and so they try to accumulate evidence which proves this point. However, there is currently NO evidence which supports this conclusion. There are only pieces of evidence which demonstrate transient emotional effects and correlations of preferences. You cannot go from transient emotional effects to "violent media causes violent criminals", nor can you go from preference correlation to "violent media causes violent criminals".
So what you're basically saying, is sensory exposure to death has turned you off to violence, but sensory exposure to death has turned others on to violence. The variable which changes in these two conditions is the individual. Think about it.
So look at the statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
So let's forget about anecdotes and look at the statistics. What has happened to rates of violent crimes as games have gotten more and more realistically violent? They've dropped. [usdoj.gov] What's more, they've dropped most dramatically in the very demographic group that plays these games. That doesn't necessarily prove that games prevent violence, but it does prove that the pro-violence effect of games (if there is any at all) is so small as to be utterly swamped by other social and demographic factors affecting rates of violence.
As for brain scans, you can be sure that pretty much any activity that people enjoy and like to do repeatedly alters brain activity, but the interpretation of these changes in blood flow over rather large regions of the brain is still pretty much at the level of "Just-So" stories. At this point, it's a lot more speculation than science.
Re:Laughable example (Score:5, Insightful)
And 2005 is lower than 2000. But this kind of data snooping is meaningless. If you cherry-pick at these little year to year fluctuations that are down at the level of the statistical noise, you can rationalize any kind of claim you want. I'm not talking about the small and obviously statistically nonsignificant fluctuations over a year or two. With this sort of statistics, only large, consistent multiyear trends are meaningful. And the clear trend over the period when videogames have been increasing in popularity has been downward.
Which merely restates my point--the pro-violence effect of videogames if any is negligible relative to other social and demographic factors impacting rates of violence.
As for the "uncanny valley," the term was coined to account for the fact that people find state-of-the art humanoid computer graphics in multimillion dollar movies where each frame can take minutes to render to be eerie, rather than convincingly human. Are you seriously arguing that the much less sophisticated graphics in games have crossed the valley?
This is sheer rationalization. Over the period when games have gone from blocky 2D cartoon characters to 3D human-looking characters with simulated blood and gore, the only clear trend is downward. So you are arguing that it is just about to start trending upward "real soon now?"
I am a neuroscientist, and have been following such studies for years. I stand by my assessment. These blood flow measurements are intriguing, and can tell us a lot about which parts of the brain are being activated under particular circumstances, but we are a long way from understanding what that means in terms of human thought, emotion, and behavior. It is still very much speculative.
Still doesn't looks like an upward trend, though does it? If anything, it seems to have stabilized, and at a much lower level than before videogames became popular. Obviously, a downward trend cannot continue forever, or criminals would at some point be resurrecting the dead. Currently, we aren't that far above the levels that prevailed in the '50's. If videogames had such a powerful pro-violence effect--one sufficient to justify all of this concern and investment in research, then shouldn't there be a clear upward trend?