Neuroimaging and behavioral evidence that violent video games exert no negative effect on human empathy for pain and emotional reactivity to violence
- University of Vienna, Austria
- Karolinska Institute, Sweden
Abstract
Influential accounts claim that violent video games (VVG) decrease players' emotional empathy by desensitizing them to both virtual and real-life violence. However, scientific evidence for this claim is inconclusive and controversially debated. To assess the causal effect of VVGs on the behavioral and neural correlates of empathy and emotional reactivity to violence, we conducted a prospective experimental study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We recruited eighty-nine male participants without prior VVG experience. Over the course of two weeks, participants played either a highly violent video game, or a non-violent version of the same game. Before and after this period, participants completed an fMRI experiment with paradigms measuring their empathy for pain and emotional reactivity to violent images. Applying a Bayesian analysis approach throughout enabled us to find substantial evidence for the absence of an effect of VVGs on the behavioral and neural correlates of empathy. Moreover, participants in the VVG group were not desensitized to images of real-world violence. These results imply that short and controlled exposure to VVGs does not numb empathy nor the responses to real-world violence. We discuss the implications of our findings regarding the potential and limitations of experimental research on the causal effects of VVGs. While VVGs might not have a discernible effect on the investigated subpopulation within our carefully controlled experimental setting, our results cannot preclude that effects could be found in settings with higher ecological validity, in vulnerable subpopulations, or after more extensive VVG play.
Data availability
Behavioral data, fMRI signal timecourses extracted from our regions of interest, task event timings, custom STAN code, and game images used in the emotional reactivity task are accessible at https://osf.io/yx423/. Unthresholded statistical maps are accessible at https://identifiers.org/neurovault.collection:13395. These include statistical maps from the analyses underlying the definition of our regions of interest, as well as the statistical maps from the frequentist analyses presented in Appendix 5. Full fMRI datasets from all participants are accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10057633
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Grand Theft Empathy: Effects of Violent Video Games on Empathy and Emotional ReactivityOpen Science Framework, https://osf.io/yx423/.
Article and author information
Author details
Lukas Leopold Lengersdorff
Funding
Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF VRG13-007)
- Claus Lamm
Hjärnfonden (FO2014-0189)
- Pedrag Petrovic
Karolinska Institutet (2-70/2014-97)
- Pedrag Petrovic
Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse (KAW 2014.0237)
- Andreas Olsson
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Clare Press, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom
Ethics
Human subjects: The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Medical University of Vienna (decision number 1258/2017). All participants gave informed consent prior to the start of the first experimental session. The confederate depicted in Figure 1A has given informed consent that his photograph may be used for this publication.
Version history
- Received: November 16, 2022
- Preprint posted: November 7, 2023 (view preprint)
- Accepted: November 17, 2023
- Accepted Manuscript published: November 17, 2023 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: January 16, 2024 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2023, Lengersdorff et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Neuroimaging and behavioral evidence that violent video games exert no negative effect on human empathy for pain and emotional reactivity to violence
eLife 12:e84951.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84951
Further reading
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Accurate prediction of the structurally diverse complementarity determining region heavy chain 3 (CDR-H3) loop structure remains a primary and long-standing challenge for antibody modeling. Here, we present the H3-OPT toolkit for predicting the 3D structures of monoclonal antibodies and nanobodies. H3-OPT combines the strengths of AlphaFold2 with a pre-trained protein language model and provides a 2.24 Å average RMSDCα between predicted and experimentally determined CDR-H3 loops, thus outperforming other current computational methods in our non-redundant high-quality dataset. The model was validated by experimentally solving three structures of anti-VEGF nanobodies predicted by H3-OPT. We examined the potential applications of H3-OPT through analyzing antibody surface properties and antibody–antigen interactions. This structural prediction tool can be used to optimize antibody–antigen binding and engineer therapeutic antibodies with biophysical properties for specialized drug administration route.
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Background:
Preterm birth is the leading cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality worldwide. Most cases of preterm birth occur spontaneously and result from preterm labor with intact (spontaneous preterm labor [sPTL]) or ruptured (preterm prelabor rupture of membranes [PPROM]) membranes. The prediction of spontaneous preterm birth (sPTB) remains underpowered due to its syndromic nature and the dearth of independent analyses of the vaginal host immune response. Thus, we conducted the largest longitudinal investigation targeting vaginal immune mediators, referred to herein as the immunoproteome, in a population at high risk for sPTB.
Methods:
Vaginal swabs were collected across gestation from pregnant women who ultimately underwent term birth, sPTL, or PPROM. Cytokines, chemokines, growth factors, and antimicrobial peptides in the samples were quantified via specific and sensitive immunoassays. Predictive models were constructed from immune mediator concentrations.
Results:
Throughout uncomplicated gestation, the vaginal immunoproteome harbors a cytokine network with a homeostatic profile. Yet, the vaginal immunoproteome is skewed toward a pro-inflammatory state in pregnant women who ultimately experience sPTL and PPROM. Such an inflammatory profile includes increased monocyte chemoattractants, cytokines indicative of macrophage and T-cell activation, and reduced antimicrobial proteins/peptides. The vaginal immunoproteome has improved predictive value over maternal characteristics alone for identifying women at risk for early (<34 weeks) sPTB.
Conclusions:
The vaginal immunoproteome undergoes homeostatic changes throughout gestation and deviations from this shift are associated with sPTB. Furthermore, the vaginal immunoproteome can be leveraged as a potential biomarker for early sPTB, a subset of sPTB associated with extremely adverse neonatal outcomes.
Funding:
This research was conducted by the Perinatology Research Branch, Division of Obstetrics and Maternal-Fetal Medicine, Division of Intramural Research, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (NICHD/NIH/DHHS) under contract HHSN275201300006C. ALT, KRT, and NGL were supported by the Wayne State University Perinatal Initiative in Maternal, Perinatal and Child Health.
