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
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