Relationship Between The Difficulty Of Violent Video Games And Aggressive Behavior: The Moderating Effect Of Inhibitory Control

Violent video games have been becoming one of the most important forms of entertainment for teenagers.When teenagers have violent and aggressive behaviors,people are used to blame on the violence and bloody content in video games.Aggressive behavior is a conduct that the perpetrator intends to harm others' physical and psychological or infringe upon property of others,and the victim has the motivation to avoid this harm.Social learning theory,General aggression model and General learning model provide corresponding theoretical explanations for the conclusion that violent content of video game leads to players' aggressive behavior,and this conclusion has also been supported by many studies.However,in recent years,more and more researches have begun to focus on the relationship between the characteristics of violent video games and aggressive behavior from the relationship between the exposure of violent video games and aggressive behavior,and they have drawn inconsistent conclusions.The topic of the relationship between violent video games and aggressive behavior has yet to be unresolved by researches.Individual behavior is the result of the combined influence of external factors and internal factors,but many studies only focused on external factors.According to the literature review,we can be seen that the difficulty of violent video games may affect players' inhibition control,and inhibition control is closely related to aggressive behavior.However,no research of which the relationship among the difficulty of violent video games,players' inhibition control and aggressive behavior has been searched.Therefore,based on two different theoretical orientations which are Cognitive resource limited theory and the Strength model of self-control and the I3 theory,this study considered respectively the effects of interference control and prepotent response inhibition on the relationship between the difficulty of violent video games and aggressive behavior,trying to explore the mechanism of individual characteristics on aggressive behavior.This study includes a pre-experiment and two formal experiments.In the Pre-experiment,we selected a violent video game and a non-violent video game with same difficulty and controlled personality variables of trait aggression to examine the influence of violent/non-violent video games on the aggressive behavior of subjects with computer game experience under the same difficult video game condition.The results indicate that: there is no significant difference in aggressive behavior between boys ang girls.On the same level of difficulty,the content of the two games can trigger players' aggressive behavior.There is no significant difference in aggressive behavior of subjects between violent video games and non-violent video games.The results of the Pre-experiment show that the players' aggressive behavior is irrelevant with the degree of violence in the game,but whether aggressive behavior is related to the difficulty of the games is explored in Experiment 1.In Experiment 1,two video games that the same as those in the Pre-experiment are selected,and the two video games are set as high difficulty and low difficulty respectively.We adopted 2(difficulty)×2(degree of violence)of two factors of between-subjects design and controlled personality variables of trait aggression to examine the influence of difficulty of the games on aggressive behavior of the subjects with computer game experience under two different levels of violence condition.The results indicate that: difficulty of the games does affect players' aggressive behavior after controlling personality variables of trait aggression,but the degree of violence and the interactive effect of difficulty and degree of violence have no significant influence on players' aggressive behavior.We observed that difficulty of the games can affect the players' aggressive behavior from Pre-experiment and Experiment 1,and what role will the inhibition control,which is closely related to the aggressive behavior,play in the relationship between difficulty of the games and the aggressive behavior? This will be further explored in Experiment 2.In Experiment 2,we adopted the violent video games which was used in Pre-experiment and Experiment 1 and set it as two conditions of high difficulty and low difficulty.We also used 2(difficulty)×2(sequence)of two factors of between-subjects design and controlled personality variables of trait aggression,impulsive personality and game experience to examine the relationship among difficulty of the games,inhibition control and aggressive behavior.The results indicate that: difficulty of the games cannot significantly predict interference control or prepotent response inhibition after controlling personality variables of trait aggression,impulsive personality,game experience and measurement sequence.Inhibitory control cannot play respectively a significant mediating role in the relationship between difficulty of the games and players' aggressive behavior.Moreover,interference control cannot play a significant moderating role in the relationship between difficulty of the games and aggressive behavior.However,prepotent response inhibition served as a moderator in the relationship between difficulty of the games and aggressive behavior.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)The degree of violence in video games cannot affect on players' aggressive behavior,while the difficulty of games is an important factor affecting on players' aggressive behavior.That is to say,under the condition of high-difficulty video games,these players' aggressive behaviors are more than those under the condition of low-difficulty video games.(2)Prepotent response inhibition plays a moderating role in the relationship between the difficulty of violent video games and aggressive behavior.Among the players with higher level of prepotent response inhibition,the difficulty of the game has less influence on aggressive behavior.However,the more difficult the game is,the more aggressive behaviors the players with lower level of prepotent response inhibition will have.