Links between experience of playing video games, emotion recognition and sensitivity to violence

Desensitization to video games and emotion recognition were studied. It was done by testing hypotheses made using General Learning Model (Buckley & Anderson, 2006): long-term experience with media containing violence will change the evaluation of pictures containing violence by making them more pleasant and emotion recognition will change. Research participants were 4 men and 11 women, participant age varied between 19 and 24 years, mean age – 19,93 years. In the study research participants evaluated pictures from International Affective Picture System (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008) and completed emotion recognition task (Diaz, Wong, Hodgins, Chiu, & Goghari, 2016) while their frontal lobe activity was measured using FNIR to acquire the lateralization index. It was found that there is a positive relationship between the evaluation of valence of violent type pictures and right hemisphere activity, the valance evaluation of violent type pictures was positively related to experience in watching violent movies, there was found a tendency to evaluate violent type pictures as more pleasant to see in relation with experience playing violent video game. There was no relationship found between the evaluation of arousal of violent type pictures and experience playing violent video games, it was found that there is a positive relationship between the evaluation of arousal of violent type pictures and experience watching violent movies and there was no relationship found between playing violent video games and emotion recognition. The results of this study are discussed and paths for further studies are explored