The Effect Of Short Contact With Prosocial Video Games On Prosocial Behavior Of Pupils

The appearance of video games altered the way of people’s entertainment,with the popularity ofmobile devices, the number of the video games explode. A number of developers develop violentenven porn games chasing maximum profits. Reports about killing issues by overtime gameplaying can be found in both domestic and overseas. Massive researches have proved that playingviolent video games will decrease prosocial behaviors and promote players’aggressive behaviorsby increasing aggressive believes and feelings. With the development of positive psychology andthe researches move along, researchers begin to put focus in the effects of prosocial video gameson players’ prosocial behaviors,which is important for the development of children’s prosocialbehaviors. However, most research focus on adults and few research concerns the effects ofprosocialvideogamesonprimaryschool children’s prosocialbehaviorswhichis this article’s mainpurpose. This article include two researches, the first one examined the short-term effects ofplaying prosocial video games on primary school children.The second research examined themediation effects of positive feellings and prosocial thoughts.The participants of first research were270primary school students from2nd,4thand6thgrades,they were randomly assigned to play prosocial, neutral and violent video games. Withquestionnaires, test and control the game content, game difficulty and game enjoyment andprimaryschool children’s agreeableness, we conduct analysis of covariance to examined theshort-term effects of playing prosocial video games on primary school children.The second research hired150primary school students and were randomly assigned to prosocialand neutral video games. We conduct evaluation and test of multiple mediation effects withpositive feellings and prosocial thoughts as mediating variables.The main conclusions are as follows:1.Compared with neutral and violent video games, prosocialvideo games will increase children of all grades’ prosocial behaviors significantly.2.Children of4thgrades acts significantly less prosocial behaviors than2ndand6thgrade.3. The effects ofdifferent types of video games between grades are consistent. The effects of video games on boys are greater than girls who acts the same in all three video games.4. The mediation effects ofprosocial thoughts is significant while positive feellings’s mediation effect is not. Prosocial videogames can promote both positive feellings and prosocial thoughts, but prosocial games can onlyincreace children’s prosocial behaviors by increasing their prosocial thoughts.