Cognitive Neural Mechanism Of Violent Video Games On Aggression

Recently,violent crime caused by violent video games happened occasionally,which has been in the limelight among researchers resulting in fruitful findings.Plenty of behavioral researches has proved that long-time exposure to violent video games will generate a series of negative effects.Violent video games contain many shooting,stabbing,boxing and kicking behaviors,thus resulting in aggressive attitudes,beliefs,low level prosocial and helping behaviors.Nowadays,researches are focusing on the neuropsychological evidences of negative effects of violent video games.Previous fmri researches can be categorized into two aspects: one is screening individuals with high and low violent video game experiences,informing them performing cognitive or emotional task while collecting fmri data;another is selecting subjects in a random way and split into two groups and asking them to perform violent or non-violent video games,during which or performing relative task after which the fmri data was collected.These researches rarely went further to test the specific factors attributed to the abnormal brain activities of violent video games,such as the moral traits of killing behavior during game-play,which could influence the moral judgment of players and bring about moral distortion.What's more,researchers used to employ task-related fmri to investigate the negative effect of violent video games,while concerning resting state fmri researches are quite rare,which may by supportive of revealing the spontaneous brain changes after long-time exposure to violent video games.So,in this research,the resting state fmri and task-related fmri were combined to explore theneural activities affected by violent video games.The aim is:(1)the neural mechanisms of violent video games on aggression;(2)the neural activities affected by the moral trait of killing behavior during gaming.In research 1,resting state fmri was conducted to investigate 52 subjects(26 with high violent video game experiences and 26 with no violent video games)to testify the differences in spontaneous brain activities between players and non-players.The results showed that,in f ALFF,compared to control condition,the activity in conditions with high VVG experience of orbitofrontal cortex,parahippocampal gyrus,the medial temporal lobe and temporal lobe gyrus,the medial frontal and angular gyrus region were weakened,while the activity in bilateral insula,superior temporal gyrus,caudate nucleus were enhanced.This indicated that VVG could impact part of the default network,bilateral insula and some other brain regions of VVG players.The further anaylses of brain and behavior data showed that the functional connectivity in DLPFC-precuneus,vm PFC-OFC,ACC-amydgala,left fusiform-left insula negatively predict players' aggression level;and the functional connectivity in amygdala-left fusiform,OFC-lingual gyrus can positively predict the aggression level of VVG players.These results provide resting state evidences that VVG effects players' aggression.In research 2,2(subject type: violent video game players,non violent video game players)*3(violent killing:just,unjust,neutral)experimental design was adopted to investigate the brain changes during justified and unjustified killing.The results showed that in the ‘citizen-soldier' condition,in the violent video game player group,the activited region included fusiform gyrus,inferior occipital lobe,inferior parietal lobe.While in the non player group,the activited regions included the fusiform gyrus,inferior prefrontal lobe(including the OFC),temporo-parietal junction,and the superior medial prefrontal part.By contrast,non players were significantly activated in the superior temporal gyrus and the extensive prefrontal lobe than the violent video game groups.Further brain and behavior analysis found that in the ‘citizen-soldier' condition,the right medial temporal gyrus of individuals without former violent video gameexperience are related to their self-reported guilty level,and the activation of right medial temporal gyrus has a predictive function of their guilty level when shooting citizen.What's more,the activation of inferior frontal lobe of violent video game players was negatively related with their aggressive level acquired by their Buss-Perry aggression questionnaire scores,and further predicted individuals' explicit aggressive level.In conclusion,long-time exposure to violent video games will cause moral distortion and manifested in desensitization of violence,resulting in relatively strong aggressive level.