Effects of Violent Video Games on Young Children and Teenagers

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During different periods of time, people used different types of entertainment. Nowadays, the adults are usually entertaining themselves with media, and children, who are not really impressed by television, usually are font of video games. In would be good, if the games were not violent. Would you like your young or teenage child to play games, where they kill each other, and get points for this? I consider it to be the rhetorical question, because the effect of violent video games on children is negative, and probably there are no parents in the world, who would appreciate their child’s resort to violence, even if this violence is virtual. Playing violent video games can have several negative results on young children and teenagers, but it can also have neutral, or even calming effect.

In their article . Elly A. Konijn and her collegues tell about the influence of violent video games on teenage boys. They tell about the experiment: the boys were given to play violent and non-violent video games. After that they were given a reaction time task, and the winner got the possibility to blast the looser with a very loud noise (they were told that noise could cause permanent hearing damage). The results of the test were quite expectable: “…the most aggressive participants were those who played a violent game and wished they were like a violent character in the game. These participants used noise levels loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage to their partners, even though their partners had not provoked them.”( Konijn, et al. 2007). So, we can see that after playing violent games children are likely to choose the wrong “role models” to follow (the models of aggressors), and even after the game was finished, they continue to foll...

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...ames on children and adolescents, 2007, Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology, 15(2), 188-190.

Konijn, Elly A., Bijvank, Marije Nije, Bushman, Brad J., I Wish I Were a Warrior: The Role of Wishful Identification in the Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Adolescent Boys, Developmental Psychology Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association 2007, Vol. 43, No. 4, 1038 –1044

Patterson, Sean, Video Games Don’t Make Teens Violent, Shows Study, August 2013, retrieved from: http://www.webpronews.com/

Swing, Edward L., Anderson, Graig A., The Unintended Negative Consequences of Exposure to Violent Video Games,2007, Iowa State University

Unsworth, Gabrielle, Devilly, Grant J. and Ward, Tony, 'The effect of playing violent video games on adolescents: Should parents be quaking in their boots?', (2007) Psychology, Crime & Law, 13:4, 383 - 394

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