The Impact Of Violent Video Games On Unconscious Processing Of Emotional Faces

The relationship between violent video games and aggressive behavior has always been the focus of research.According to the General Aggression Model,violent video games as input variables will affect the player’s emotional processing,many researchers have found that violent video games can affect the players on mood face processing.For example,violent video game players were faster at recognizing angry and fearful faces,but slower at recognizing happy faces.This negative processing bias is considered to be the underlying cause of aggressive behavior.Previous studies on the impact of violent video games on emotional face processing were mostly based on the attentional level,but this negative bias may exist in the early stage of emotional processing.Therefore,it is necessary to examine the early stages of emotional processing in violent video game players.In this study,two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of violent video games on the unconscious processing of emotional faces by using the breaking continuous flash suppression task,which is the most commonly used task in current unconscious processing research.Reaction time and processing advantage score were used as the indicators.In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,participants were divided into a high violent game group,a low violent game group and a non-violent game group,with 25 participants in each group,according to the scores of Video game questionnaire.In Experiment 1,we found that the processing advantage of fearful faces in the high violent game group was significantly higher than that in the low violent game group and the non-game group.To further explore whether the processing advantage of the high violent game group to the fearful face was led by the low-level properties of the face,Experiment 2 scrambled and inverted all the faces.The results showed that the processing advantage scores of the high violent game group for the upright fearful face were larger than those of the non-violent game group and the low violent game group,and the processing advantage scores for the upright angry face were larger than those of the low violent game group.There was no significant difference in the processing advantage scores of the three groups of participants in the disorganized fearful face,the disorganized angry face and the inverted angry face.In addition,the three groups of participants had processing advantage in the inverted fearful face,but there was no significant difference between the high violent game group and the non-game group and the low violent game group.These results suggest that the greater processing advantage of the high violent game group to the fearful and angry faces is not caused by the low-level properties of the face.In this study,we concluded that in b-CFS task,fearful faces were the fastest to break through inhibition into consciousness,while angry faces,disgustful faces and sad faces were slower to break through inhibition.In addition,compared with the non-game group and the low-violent game group,the individuals in the high-violent game group had a greater processing advantage for fearful and angry faces,and this advantage was not guided by the low-level properties of the faces.