Violent Video Games and Causes of Childrens Behavior Problems

Video games can cause behavior problems
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Video games can cause behavior problems
Introduction
Video games do have an effect on people’s behaviors and can cause behavior problems on children. However, these effects have been found to be both positive and negative, depending on the type and content of the video game. For instance, violent video games and educative video games have different effects on people. Age is also a factor. Children are more influenced more psychologically by these video games than adults and this may lead to behavior problems if exposed to violent and highly sexual explicit video games with no control. According to Brad Bushman, a psychology professor from Ohio University, says research shows that violent media (e.g. violent video games) is harmful to the children though there was no direct connection to their aggressiveness in real life (Bushman, 2014). This paper focuses on how video games do cause behavior problems among children and even adults.
Effect of violent video games on Children’s behavior
For a long time, research on the effect of violent video games on people especially children have been sparse and weak. However, the current research findings have shown a clear connection between children’s exposure to violence in video games and anti-social behaviors such as extreme aggressiveness in real life (Anderson& Gentile, 2006). Those children exposed to more violent video games have been found to be more aggressive and were involved in fights more frequently than those exposed to non-violent video game.
Figure 1: Relationship between video game violence exposure and aggressive behavior in male and female. (Anderson& Gentile, 2006)
Figure 1 above illustrates that how amount of exposure to the violent video games and the gender of the player are affected. Those who are exposed more to the violent video games tend to involve themselves in fights. Boys develop more aggressive behaviors than girls thus they get involved in fights more. Research confirms that the content of the game was more responsible in causing increased aggressiveness in children’s behavior, feelings and thoughts on both long term and short term basis (Gentile & Anderson, 2003). This means those children that were exposed to violent video games repeatedly for a longtime exhibited more aggressiveness in outlook, attitude, perpetual bias, belief and behavior. Boys showed more aggressiveness than girls. Those children exposed to violent video games have a higher risk of becoming violent in life. Games such double dragon and mortal combat which exhibit extreme violence and bloody scene has been accused of causing behaviors problems in most children. However, it was realized that sometimes this aggressiveness was not caused by violent video games but by other underlying factors such as psychological disorder, drug abuse, and poverty.
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Figure 2: Relationship between video game violence and trait aggressiveness (Anderson, & Dill, 2000).
Figure 2 above illustrates that when a child is exposed to violent video game for a longtime, he/she will start developing some aggressive beliefs, be...