Teenage boys’ brains ‘desensitised’ by violent videos allege US scientists
Scientists at the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Maryland have released findings that some are saying shows that violent imagery in video games, movie & TV. The research seems to indicate that being exposed to violent scenes can change the emotional reactions of teenage boys over time, and perhaps even make them more prone to violence.
The study was led by Jordan Grafman and can be read in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. What the investigation did was to show a group of 22 boys with ages ranging between 14 and 17 ‘short clips’ of violent videos whilst looking at brain scans and using a ‘lie detector’ which measures conductivity of the skin and can be used to measure emotional response.
Levels of emotional response to the video clips were found to decrease as the experiment progressed, leading to the conclusion that desensitization was linked to exposure. In the words of Dr Grafman:
“The important new finding is that exposure to the most violent videos inhibits emotional reactions to similar aggressive videos over time”
From this finding Grafman goes on to entertain the idea that
“[it is possible] that continued exposure to violent videos will make an adolescent less sensitive to violence, more accepting of violence, and more likely to commit aggressive acts since the emotional component associated with aggression is reduced and normally acts as a brake on aggressive behaviour.”
This makes the assumption that watching a violent act on a screen is equivalent to experiencing violence in other ways.
“The electronic media concerned with aggression stimulates structures in the brain that are typically activated when people imagine being aggressive and, we assume, when they actually are aggressive. [I think] an adolescent [would]tend to be more aggressive and accept that aggression is normal behaviour given prior exposure to video games”
The small sample size and scale of the experiment and sheer number of assumptions and logical leaps that have to be completed make this sweeping attack on electronic entertainment particularly hard to justify. It ignores rationality, morality and empathy – considering it to be the norm that these things will be entirely absent in young men and boys.
The truth is that the link between seeing violence on the screen and performing acts of violence has not been shown. Parents letting television, computer games and the Internet take the place of their taking an active part in bringing up their offspring seems far more likely to be producing maladjusted youth.
