27. May 2011 by John Schinnerer.

Mike’s fist explodes in the teenager’s face like a car bomb detonating in the middle of Times Square. He has heavy, brick hands that smack right through the skin and skull of his opponent. Hit after hit rain down – head, body, head, head. His opponent’s knees wobble from sledgehammer blows, the brain temporarily ceasing to defend the body. Sensing the opening, Mike grabs the shoulders of his adversary and yanks the boy’s head straight down onto his rapidly rising knee. The jolt snaps the boy’s head back as a thick spray of metallic-tasting, black blood spurts from his mouth and nose. Barely conscious, the boy’s head cracks against the pavement. Blood leaks onto the concrete. He is no longer a threat, yet Mike continues to kick his torso and stomp on his head. Mike picks up the limp, lifeless body and slams the other boy’s head against the hood of a 2008 Dodge Charger, leaving a dent in the hood and head. As he lifts his fist to continue the carnage, Mike’s friends grab his arm, saying “I think you’ve done enough. He’s finished.” Mike drops the boy on the ground, unconscious, bleeding, concussed and injured for life.

This fight and countless others occurred at Snake Park in Blackhawk, CA.  I see clients with anger management problems daily. My clients tell me all about the frequent fights that occur in the San Ramon Valley. My sense is that, over the past two decades, fighting among adolescent males has increased in aggression, violence and desensitization. Every adolescent male client that I see plays highly violent video games on a daily basis. Games such as Call of Duty (COD), KillZone, and Mortal Kombat 9. This is on top of playing realistic and painful war games with Air Soft guns.

And just to give you a little taste of what gamers are repeatedly seeing, here is a sample fatality from the latest Mortal Kombat…

So you can imagine my concern when the following study came out today…

Violent Video Games Reduce Brain Response to Violence and Increase Aggressive Behavior, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (May 25, 2011) — Scientists have known for years that playing violent video games causes players to become more aggressive. The findings of a new University of Missouri (MU) study provide one explanation for why this occurs: the brains of violent video game players become less responsive to violence, and this diminished brain response predicts an increase in aggression.

“Many researchers have believed that becoming desensitized to violence leads to increased human aggression. Until our study, however, this causal association had never been demonstrated experimentally,” said Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science.

During the study, 70 young adult participants were randomly assigned to play either a nonviolent or a violent video game for 25 minutes. Immediately afterwards, the researchers measured brain responses as participants viewed a series of neutral photos, such as a man on a bike, and violent photos, such as a man holding a gun in another man’s mouth. Finally, participants competed against an opponent in a task that allowed them to give their opponent a controllable blast of loud noise. The level of noise blast the participants set for their opponent was the measure of aggression.

The researchers found that participants who played one of several popular violent games, such as “Call of Duty,” “Hitman,” “Killzone” and “Grand Theft Auto,” set louder noise blasts for their opponents during the competitive task — that is, they were more aggressive — than participants who played a nonviolent game. In addition, for participants that had not played many violent video games before completing the study, playing a violent game in the lab caused a reduced brain response to the photos of violence — an indicator of desensitization. Moreover, this reduced brain response predicted participants’ aggression levels: the smaller the brain response to violent photos, the more aggressive participants were.

Participants who had already spent a lot of time playing violent video games before the study showed small brain response to the violent photos, regardless of which type of game they played in the lab.

“The fact that video game exposure did not affect the brain activity of participants who already had been highly exposed to violent games is interesting and suggests a number of possibilities,” Bartholow said. “It could be that those individuals are already so desensitized to violence from habitually playing violent video games that an additional exposure in the lab has very little effect on their brain responses. There also could be an unmeasured factor that causes both a preference for violent video games and a smaller brain response to violence. In either case, there are additional measures to consider.”

Bartholow said that future research should focus on ways to moderate media violence effects, especially among individuals who are habitually exposed. He cites surveys that indicate that the average elementary school child spends more than 40 hours a week playing video games — more than any other activity besides sleeping. As young children spend more time with video games than any other forms of media, the researchers say children could become accustomed to violent behavior as their brains are forming.

“More than any other media, these video games encourage active participation in violence,” said Bartholow. “From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence.”

The journal article, “This Is Your Brain on Violent Video Games: Neural Desensitization to Violence Predicts Increased Aggression Following Violent Video Game Exposure,” will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

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This spiraling trend of increasing glorification of violence has got to stop if we want to reduce aggression and violence in our teenagers. Today’s culture, replete with MMA, UFC, Air Soft guns, COD, street fights and dehumanization of others threatens the very fabric of our society. Where does it end?

What are your thoughts? What do you think? Have we gone too far when we paint a picture of victory as ripping out your opponent’s spine and beating him to death with his own skull as in the new Mortal Kombat 9? At what point are we oversaturating our children with the message that violence is an acceptable solution to disagreement? I’d love to hear your opinion!

All the best,

John Schinnerer Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self

Anger management geek

For a free PDF copy of John’s award-winning book on anger, anxiety and depression, simply visit www.GuideToSelf.com click on the yellow book icon and enter your name and email address on the following page. You will be sent an email to verify your email address and then receive instant access to your book!  

University of Missouri-Columbia (2011, May 25). Violent video games reduce brain response to violence and increase aggressive behavior, study suggests. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 26, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2011/05/110525151059.htm

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20. October 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From ScienceDaily.com…

ScienceDaily (Oct. 19, 2010) — Watching violent films, TV programs or video games desensitizes teenagers, blunts their emotional responses to aggression and potentially promotes aggressive attitudes and behavior, according to new research recently published online in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Although previous research has suggested that people can become more aggressive and desensitized to real-life violence after repeatedly viewing violent media programs, little is known about how the extent of watching such programs and the severity of the aggression displayed affects the brains of adolescents. “It is especially important to understand this because adolescence is a time when the brain is changing and developing, particularly in the parts of the brain that control emotions, emotional behavior and responses to external events,” said Dr Jordan Grafman, who led the research.

Dr Grafman, senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, USA), and colleagues recruited 22 boys between the ages of 14-17 to the study. The boys each watched short, four-second clips of violent scenes from 60 videos, arranged randomly in three lots of 20 clips. The degree of violence and aggression in each scene was low, mild or moderate, and there were no extreme scenes. They were asked to rate the aggression of each scene by pressing one of two response buttons at the end of each clip to say whether they thought it was more or less aggressive than the previous video. The boys were positioned in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner that collected data on their brain function while they watched the videos. They also had electrodes attached to the fingers of their non-dominant hand to test for skin conductance responses (SCR). This is a method of measuring the electrical conductance of the skin, which varies with moisture (sweat) levels and is a sensitive way of measuring people’s emotions and responses to internal or external stimuli.

Dr Grafman said: “We found that as the boys were exposed to more violent videos over time, their activation in brain regions concerned with emotional reactivity decreased and that was reflected in the data from the functional MRI and in the skin conductance responses.”

Data from the SCR showed that the boys became more desensitized towards the videos the longer they watched them and also that they were more desensitized by the mildly and moderately violent videos, but not the ones that contained a low degree of violence. Data on brain activation patterns showed a similar effect. In particular, the area known as the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC), which is thought to be involved in emotions and emotional responses to events, showed increasing desensitization over time, and this was most marked for the most aggressive videos (showing moderate violence) in the study.

The researchers also found that boys who had the most exposure to violent media in their daily lives, as measured by screening tests and questions in their initial meeting with the researchers, showed the greatest desensitization.

Dr Grafman said: “The important new finding is that exposure to the most violent videos inhibits emotional reactions to similar aggressive videos over time and implies that normal adolescents will feel fewer emotions over time as they are exposed to similar videos. This finding is driven by reduced posterior brain activation and therefore the frontal lobe doesn’t react as it normally would.

“The implications of this are many and include the idea that continued exposure to violent videos will make an adolescent less sensitive to violence, more accepting of violence, and more likely to commit aggressive acts since the emotional component associated with aggression is reduced and normally acts as a brake on aggressive behavior. No prior study has examined this from the complete perspective we had that included behavior, brain activation, and SCRs in adolescent brains.”

As the study recruited only boys, it is not possible to say whether the same effect would be seen in girls. “The incidence rate of aggression in females, even in female teenagers that are exposed to some of the same biopsychosocial challenges as male adolescents, is low and raises the questions of what brain mechanisms and autonomic differences are associated with this gender difference,” write the authors.

They conclude: “We propose that exposure to aggressive media results in a blunting of emotional responses, which in turn may prevent the connection of consequences of aggression with an appropriate emotional response, and therefore may increase the likelihood that aggression is seen as acceptable behavior.”

Dr Grafman believes that the findings of the study can be extrapolated to the way people would behave in real life situations. “The electronic media concerned with aggression does stimulate structures in the brain that are typically activated when people imagine being aggressive and, we assume, when they actually are aggressive. Most people can distinguish between playing a video game and real live behavior, but given the right circumstances where the rules are a bit more ambiguous (what if a bully provokes me) and provocative (someone is trying to take my lunch money), would an adolescent tend to be more aggressive and accept that aggression as normal behavior given prior exposure to video games? I think so. Particularly if they are a heavy user of games and, in our device-driven world, that will be more and more likely in the future.”

Journal Reference:

1. Maren Strenziok, Frank Krueger, Gopikrishna Deshpande, Rhoshel K. Lenroot, Elke van der Meer, and Jordan Grafman. Fronto-parietal regulation of media violence exposure in adolescents: a multi-method study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2010 DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsq079

For a free PDF copy of John’s award-winning book on ways to manage anger, visit www.GuideToSelf.com.

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide To Self

Posted in Anger management therapy, Men's feelings, Managing anger, Workplace bullies, Impact of video games, Free self-help book, De-escalating anger, Danville CA, School age bullies, Emotional IQ, Guide To Self Beginners Guide To Managing Emotion, Anger Management, Men's emotions, Dr. John Schinnerer | Print | No Comments »

13. October 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From ScienceDaily…

ScienceDaily (Oct. 12, 2010) — Children who spend longer than two hours in front of a computer or television screen are more likely to suffer psychological difficulties, regardless of how physically active they are.

The PEACH project, a study of over a 1,000 children aged between ten and 11, measured the time children spent in front of a screen as well as their psychological well being. In addition, an activity monitor recorded both children’s sedentary time and moderate physical activity. The results showed that more than two hours per day of both television viewing and recreational computer use were related to higher psychological difficulty scores, regardless of how much time the children spent on physical activity.

The authors of the report, published in the November edition of the journal Pediatrics, conclude that limiting children’s screen time may be important for ensuring children’s future health and wellbeing.

According to the activity monitor, the children in the study who spent more time sedentary had better psychological scores overall. Those children who did more moderate physical activity fared better in certain psychological areas, including emotional and peer problems, but fared worse in some areas related to behaviour, including hyperactivity.

Lead author Dr Angie Page from the University of Bristol’s Centre for Exercise, Nutrition and Health Sciences said: “Whilst low levels of screen viewing may not be problematic, we cannot rely on physical activity to ‘compensate’ for long hours of screen viewing.

“Watching TV or playing computer games for more than two hours a day is related to greater psychological difficulties irrespective of how active children are.”

Children’s psychological wellbeing was assessed on the basis of a strengths and difficulties questionnaire which rated their emotional, peer, conduct and hyperactivity problems.

The children were asked to rate a series of statements as true on a three-point scale, varying from not true, to somewhat true to certainly true. Statements to assess their emotional wellbeing included; ‘I am often unhappy, down-hearted or tearful’, while statements to assess their peer problems included; ‘I am usually on my own’, ‘I generally play alone or keep to myself’.

This work was supported by the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF UK) and the National Prevention Research Initiative.

University of Bristol (2010, October 12). Screen time linked to psychological problems in children. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 13, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2010/10/101011085958.htm

 Can we extend this study to adults who spend the majority of their time in front of computer screens at work and in front of the TV to unwind?

One of the solutions is to get out into nature as we know that being in nature has a restorative effect on the human mind.

Mindfulness also is a potential solution as it requires silence (what a concept!) which means turning off all electronics.

To live, love and laughter!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self, Inc.

P.S. For a FREE copy of John’s award-winning self-help book, just visit www.GuideToSelf.com and click on the yellow book icon. In exchange for your email address and name, you will receive an instant PDF copy of Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought! Check it out now. It will take you less than 2 minutes.

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