Effects of Electronic Media Impact of Violent Video Games in Breeding Aggressive Behavior Among Children

Abstract

Playing video games have become one of the most favorite activities among children. A rising body of research is connecting violent video game play to violent cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors. The main goal of this research was to document the habits of video games play among adolescents and the level of parental supervision of children’s’ video game exposure. The second aim was to observe relations among violent video game exposure, aggression, arguments with peers and physical fights. Also an experiment was conducted on children of ages between 12 to 16 years where participants were offered to play two different video games (Call of Duty 4 and Tekken 3). After that all the participants were observed in a free play and questionnaires were distributed among children in order to analyze their cognitions and behavior. Finally, Social learning theory (Bandura, 1965; 1971; 1986) was applied in order to find whether children actually learn from media models or not. Key findings of this study are since this was an experimental study being conducted on the children the results obtained were short term because short term effects are those where the players are supposed to play a certain video game for short span of time for instance 20 minutes. From the research I am of the view that children exposed to violent video games are more aggressive than the children who play non violent video games.