Violent video games, empathy, and personality traits: are they related?
Can video games influence our personalities and the way we behave? Is there a causal relationship between playing video games, mainly the ones with violent content, such as Grand Theft Auto V, and becoming a violent person? If so, what factors are important to explain this phenomenon – the type of video game, hours played, the age at which the gamer was initially exposed to the game, or different personality traits?
Days after violent incidents, such as shootings, we see it everywhere – different forms of media inviting some figure of authority (not always an expert on the subject!) to discuss how likely it was that gaming habits provoked the incident. Researchers everywhere are trying to understand how different video games can affect players’ behavior in various ways, for better or worse.
Source: https://www.playstation.com/en-ca/games/grand-theft-auto-v/
A group of scientists from the University of Western Ontario, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the Lawson Health Research Institute, and St. Joseph’s Health Care London, have devised an interesting study to tackle some of the aforementioned questions, mainly: (1) whether violent video game exposure (VGE) could alter the functioning of key brain regions for empathic processing, (2) whether acute (one hour) and chronic/cumulative (over two weeks) VGE impact those regions differently, and (3) whether there is an interaction between VGE and the Cold-heartedness trait.
This study explores the impact of VGE on empathic processing, but what exactly does that mean? First, what is empathic processing exactly? In general words, empathy is our ability to understand others’ feelings and vicariously share their experience. Empathy can be broken down into different types: cognitive, emotional, and motor. When watching a movie with a very sad ending, most of us will end up shedding a tear (or two!) for a character, even knowing that the character is fictional – this would be an example of emotional empathy.
Cognitive empathy is more complex: you are not only sharing the other’s experience as a bystander, but you are also putting yourself in their shoes – i.e., I understand that person’s frustration because, if I were the one going through the same situation, I would feel the same.
Another modality of empathy is motor empathy, which is the focus of this study. We can, consciously or unconsciously, imitate a particular movement or facial expression that another person is making – how many times have you seen someone yawning, and right after, you also yawned? Most likely, some readers either yawned or thought about yawning after reading the example. And this is one of the cool things about motor empathy; it is not only about imitating another’s movements, but also imagining the movement!
The authors wanted to assess the relationship between VGE and a particular personality trait as a secondary objective. We must, firstly, define the concept of personality traits. Personality traits define how we operate in the world: our thought patterns and behavior. We all know selfless people and others who are very selfish. Cold-heartedness is another personality trait; a person with high scores in this personality trait tends not to feel guilty frequently, having little regard for others’ well-being.
To assess the relationship between VGE, empathic processing, and personality, the researchers recruited 52 healthy adults, both females, and males. The subjects had to perform different activities, which included answering multiple questionnaires (mainly to check how much of the cold-heartedness trait they displayed), undergoing fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), which is an imaging modality that allows the researchers to see which brain regions are being more engaged/activated when a person is performing an activity or thinking about something, a motor task, and of course, playing a video game!
Grand Theft Auto V was the game of choice. In this game, the player can perform various activities – both violent/illegal (e.g., shooting non-player characters and selling/buying illicit drugs) and non-violent (e.g., piloting planes and dancing at nightclubs). The participants were separated into two different groups: one group played the game engaging in the violent aspects of the game, while the other had to play a modified non-violent version of the game. After playing one of the two versions of the game for one hour, the participants had an fMRI brain scan while they performed a specific motor task (images and videos of specific hand/finger movements were presented to them, and they had to either just observe or simulate the movement). This motor task was designed to activate specific brain regions, such as the Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) and the Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS). Both regions house the mirror neuron system, a specific circuit of neurons that is activated whenever we execute or observe an action. This system is related to “sensorimotor processes that are considered an important neurocognitive building block of empathy.”1
By comparing those who played the violent version of the game to the ones who played the modified version, the researchers found that acute exposure to violent gaming increases the signal in the IFG but not in the STS. Because the IFG is also strongly associated with emotional empathy, it might be that when the players interact with the characters in the game, in the violent version of it, their brains are processing the information as they would in the real world!
Curiously, they found that cumulative violent gaming actually decreases the signal in the IFG. Thus, as it seems, depending on your gaming routine, your brain is being influenced in different ways. As for the personality traits, contrary to what was initially predicted, there was no relationship between playing violent games, the activity of the specific brain regions analyzed, and the cold-heartedness trait scores.
Although uncertainty still permeates this subject, the researchers tackled many important questions as they showed that playing a violent video game for a short amount of time, or a longer one, can differentially influence the IFG, which is an important brain region for empathy. Altering these neural circuits might be one of the ways by which the VGE can influence our behavior. In addition, the researchers did not find any links between motor empathy processing and the cold-heartedness trait. This lack of a link suggests that for VGE to influence the player’s conduct, it would not depend on the player already manifesting, previous to the game exposure, behavioral patterns compatible with high cold-heartedness scores.
With billions of gamers around the globe and billions of dollars flowing through the gaming industry, it is undeniable that playing videogames has become one of the main hobbies for many people in the past few decades; and although we are still not entirely sure how videogames impact our behavior, despite the substantial amount of research being conducted on the subject, we can be sure that videogames are here to stay.
1. Compton, S. A., Ritchie, M., Oliver, L., Finger, E., & Mitchell, D. G. (2022). Dissociable effects of acute versus cumulative violent video game exposure on the action simulation circuit in university students. Social neuroscience, 17(4), 368-381.