Video Game and Aggression Associations/Links
So a good friend sent me this article a few days ago and when I saw it was a great feeling. I’ll give a brief synopsis of the paper and if you would like to read it click on the link above!
Basically in a nut shell a Professor at Texas A&M, Chris Ferguson, conducted a meta analysis on the links to video games and aggression. After the correlations and statistical calculations were conducted the overall correlation was found to be a .14, which in non-statistical savvy individuals, is a 2% overlap of aggression and video games. Our morning meal has more of an impact on our mood that video games is what this is stating.
That is not even the interesting part. It gets better. Dr. Ferguson look at all of the studies presented and discovered that the bulk of the articles were from one man, Craig Anderson. For those who do not know, Dr. Anderson is the main proponent for the linkage between aggression and video games. Dr. Ferguson is one of the many individuals who have seen this and pointed it out, but some people in power like to overlook this fact, thank god the Obama Administration did not.
Dr. Ferguson took all of the studies and then corrected for publication bias and the .14 correlation dropped to a .04, negligible.
An additional finding actually was that video game playing was found to be correlated with visuospatial cognition, 24% overlap which is over 10X the effect of video games and aggression.
Here is what Visuospatial Cognition is:
a highly complex cognitive process, which requires the explorative scanning by eye movements, the quick and accurate direction of attention, the anticipation of the consequences of actions, and the integration of current visual input with stored representations of previously viewed parts of the scene and knowledge of objects and their relationships.
Take a look at the paper, it is a great paper and has a lot of good informational points in it
Anthony Bean, Ph.D. 