By Asher Agarwal, Class of 2027

Recently, many media sources have been spreading concern that violent video games desensitize players to violence and damage their sense of empathy. Researchers at the University of Vienna and Karolinska Institute in Sweden attempted to test this hypothesis by utilizing fMRI technology. fMRI is a machine that allows one to indirectly measure the activity of the brain as it correlates to blood flow. Analysis of brain activity provides useful insight into the subjects’ response to given stimuli. Brain regions activated during the experience of feeling empathy include the anterior insula and the anterior midcingulate gyrus. 

Researchers conducted a prospective study to gauge the long-term effects of gameplay compared to previous studies. 89 male participants, 18-35 years of age, without prior experience playing violent video games were chosen and separated into two groups. The treatment group played a violent video game for 2 weeks, while the control group played a non-violent version that was otherwise the same. The researchers used an empathy-for-pain task where participants either passively received electrical stimuli or viewed someone else experiencing the shock. They were then asked to rate the unpleasantness of the last stimulus for half of the total stimuli. Researchers also used an emotional reactivity task where participants were presented with either violent or non-violent images given a real-world or in-game context and asked to rate how unpleasant the images were. fMRIs were taken throughout both tasks. 

For the empathy-for-pain task, data analysis showed no significant difference in the painfulness ratings between those who played violent video games and those who didn’t. Additionally, no desensitizing effect of violent video game play was found in the analysis of the unpleasantness ratings from the emotional reactivity task. fMRI scans from both tasks also showed an absence of an effect on the regions of interest chosen by the researchers, indicating no difference in empathy.

The results from this study show that despite concerns, 2-week exposure to violent video gameplay does not affect empathy or cause improper responses to violence in real life. However, the study is limited in its consideration of vulnerable subpopulations, such as younger children, as well as the length of the treatment. Future studies should test different populations of people and track more long-term effects of violent video game gameplay via a longitudinal study which would follow the participant’s results throughout a longer period of time. 

Figure 1 A child with a serious expression playing a video game.

Works Cited: 

[1] L. Lengersdorff, et al., Neuroimaging and behavioral evidence that violent video games exert no negative effect on human empathy for pain and emotional reactivity to violence. eLife 12 (2023). doi: 10.7554/eLife.84951.[2] Image retrieved from:  https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-young-boy-wearing-headphones-while-playing-computer-game-7046718/