Charging Neutral Cues with Aggressive Meaning through Violent Video Game Play

Robert Busching and Barbara Krahé
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Robert Busching: Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24/25, D-14476 Potsdam, Germany
Barbara Krahé: Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24/25, D-14476 Potsdam, Germany

Societies, 2013, vol. 3, issue 4, 1-12

Abstract: When playing violent video games, aggressive actions are performed against the background of an originally neutral environment, and associations are formed between cues related to violence and contextual features. This experiment examined the hypothesis that neutral contextual features of a virtual environment become associated with aggressive meaning and acquire the function of primes for aggressive cognitions. Seventy-six participants were assigned to one of two violent video game conditions that varied in context (ship vs. city environment) or a control condition. Afterwards, they completed a Lexical Decision Task to measure the accessibility of aggressive cognitions in which they were primed either with ship-related or city-related words. As predicted, participants who had played the violent game in the ship environment had shorter reaction times for aggressive words following the ship primes than the city primes, whereas participants in the city condition responded faster to the aggressive words following the city primes compared to the ship primes. No parallel effect was observed for the non-aggressive targets. The findings indicate that the associations between violent and neutral cognitions learned during violent game play facilitate the accessibility of aggressive cognitions.

Keywords: media violence; aggressive cognitions; associative networks; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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