A recent research from The National Institutes of Health revealed that violent images from movies or video games boost teens’ aggression. The study was conducted on 22 boys aged 14-17 and already the US results are put under doubt by a UK expert which considers that a lab research cannot reveal the reasons behind violence while those are too complex to be understood, at least for now.
This debate lasts for decades and various studies suggest that violent images, whether from video games or TV, have a major effect on how the brain processes emotional responses.
The study, as said above, was conducted on 22 boys and involved using 60 violent scenes from different videos. There weren’t any extreme violence scene only low to moderate ones, and each boy had to rate each video according to how violent it was in their opinion. While rating it, their brains were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging to show which parts of the brain are active. As time went on, an area of the brain related to emotional processing showed less activity with each picture that passed on. Professor David Buckingham said this shows that teens develope a tolerance to this kind of images, or simple said, boredom.
On the other hand, Dr. Grafman from The National Institutes of Health said this tolerance to violence migh in fact mean more violent reactions from the person watching violent images/videos and this is a social problem that can grow in time. This is a debate that first started in the 19th Century and it seems it will be alive many years from now on while the reasons behind aggresivity and violence are more too complex to be understood in a laboratory.