This essay assesses the negative impact of violent video games on the behavior, mental health, aggressive nature, and academic performances of the children who are addicted to those violent video games.
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Running head: NEGATIVE EFFECT OF VIDEO GAMES ON CHILDREN Negative Effect of Video Games on Children Name of the Student Name of the University Author Note
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1NEGATIVE EFFECT OF VIDEO GAMES ON CHILDREN In recent years, the increasing trends of mass shooting fueled the controversies that is, if the violent video games has any impact on the child and youths. However, it is not a secret today that the children are quite fond of various types of video games now a days. The excessive engagement towards the video games is effecting the child’s health in both physical and mental ways. Nowadays, most of the youths and children. It is observed that, the violent video games have severe negative impact on cognitive behavior, physiological behavior and also on the academic performances of the children who are addicted to the video games. It is often observed that, the children, who are engaged in playing violent video games, are more aggressive and violent in nature and such behavior will affect the child more severely along with time(Kimmig, Andringa & Derntl, 2018). The essay, will assess the negative impact of violent video games on the behavior, mental health, aggressive nature and mental health condition and academic performances of the children who are addicted to those violent video games. Various studies showed that, the violent video games can promote the aggressive behavior of the children and along with this, it also promote reduction in the social behavior, alteration in cognitive behavior as well. The study of Kuhn et al. (2018), focused on the fact that, the violent video games may reduce the empathy and promote the aggression among the children. In their study, almost 90 healthy subjects were used in that study and all the participants played videogames for 2 months and it was observed that, there was a significant positive relation among the aggression and violent video games on those subject population. In a recent study comprised of meta-analysis of 98 studies showed that the violent video games negatively affects the social behavior of the study participants. In addition, it was observed that, a few subject population was asked to play violent games and previously they were playing non violent games. After that their behaviors were measured that and it was observed that shifting towards
2NEGATIVE EFFECT OF VIDEO GAMES ON CHILDREN the violent games from the non-violent games caused shifting of their behavior and they became less concerned about the social tasks. This study results immediately showed that, the shifting to the violent video games is associated with the immediate change of behavior among the children are playing violent games. According to the study ofGreitemeyer & Mügge(2014), it was established that, the violent video exposure seriously affect the social and related cognitive behavior of the children. On the other hand they also observed that, prosocial video games may cause decrease in the aggressive behavior of the children. In addition, it was revealed in the studies that, time is a key factor in between the aggressive behavior and violent video games as it was noted that if a person plays violent video games for 3 days in a consecutive manner, the person will develop aggressive behavior. Therefore a short session of violent gaming will create short term aggression in that child ( Hughes, 2014). Thereafter, the violent video gaming practice can also negatively affect the academic performances of the children and this fact is supported by various studies. The study ofTerry & Malik(2018) established the relationship in between the video gaming and poor academic performances.The researcher conducted their research in the mid-western Canadian School Division and in this study, almost 82 students participated and among them 29 were males and 53 were female. They used questionnaire for collecting the data and along with academic performance they also assessed the attendance rate in the school of those students. The results were differently analyzed for the males and females of the total subject population. In this study, they used Pearson product-moment correlation to establish relation among the school performance scores and violent gaming practice of the children.From the result they concluded that for the male students the video game playing and attendance in the school has a negative relation with each other that is the students who are playing more video games , they are mostly
3NEGATIVE EFFECT OF VIDEO GAMES ON CHILDREN absent in their classes. In addition they also found that, video game playing will also negatively impact their final marks. Moreover, the boys reported that they felt sleepy in the school as they were playing more violent video games. The violent video game has also negative behavior on the physical and mental health of the children. In studies, it was monitored that, the children who used to play violent video games, had altered heart rate, problems of nausea and dizziness and also had aggressive nature. Moreover, the addiction to playing video game is associated with the obesity of the children and the number is increasing day by day. In addition, such violent video games can also hamper the development of brain of the children. It was found that violent video gaming practice negatively impacted the structure and activity of the human brain and these changes are associated with change in behavior and brain functionality of the children. The impact of violent video games on the mental health condition of the children are also a serious area of concern in recent times. According to WHO, excessive gaming can be a disorder that is “gaming disorder”. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had included the gaming disorder in their DSM-5 criteria for further investigation (Mammoser, 2018). The study ofGrant, Spears & Pedersen(2018) showed that excessive violent video gaming can cause serious mental problems such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression. In this study, they recruited 1023 children and among them 53.9% reported about playing video games regularly. They found that, almost 43.4% of the gaming children had PTSD and positive signs of depression. The more amount of time, the children are playing video games, those children are more prone to have mental health issues such as depression and PTSD. So it is quite possible that, the violent video gaming practice and children’s mental health
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4NEGATIVE EFFECT OF VIDEO GAMES ON CHILDREN are correlated with each other and video gaming practice in the children may cause mental health problems among the children who are addicted to the violent video gaming. Not only this, but the violent video games addiction has become a serious area of concern for the mental health experts as it is now counted as a disease according to the WHO. The mental health experts reported that they faced situations where they had to treat children who are addicted to gaming. The situation has become so serious that WHO will include this mental health problem in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). In 2016, almost 13% of Ontario kids that is almost addicted to the violent video gaming and the number is almost 123,000 kids in total. According to the report, the percentage of video gaming addicted children is higher by 9% than that of the 2007 In recent times, 1 out of 5 children is affected by this gaming addiction. Along with this , there are also some instances where video game addiction has become fatal for the children as in some cases it was noted that children had taken steps like committing suicide just because they were restricted to play video games (Oliveira, 2018). Hence it can be concluded that, the violent video gaming practice has immense negative impact on the children as they are very much addicted to those video games as most of the children have become socially inactive due to their video gaming addiction. Therefore, violent video gaming practice not only affects the mental, physiological and psychological health of the children but it also hampers the academic performance of the children as well.
5NEGATIVE EFFECT OF VIDEO GAMES ON CHILDREN References Grant, S., Spears, A., & Pedersen, E. R. (2018). Video Games as a Potential Modality for Behavioral Health Services for Young Adult Veterans: Exploratory Analysis.JMIR serious games,6(3). Greitemeyer, T., & Mügge, D. O. (2014). Video games do affect social outcomes: A meta- analytic review of the effects of violent and prosocial video game play.Personality and social psychology bulletin,40(5), 578-589. Hughes, E. (2014). Effect of Video Games on Child Development | Developmental Psychology at Vanderbilt. Retrieved from https://my.vanderbilt.edu/developmentalpsychologyblog/2014/04/effect-of-video-games- on-child-development/ Kimmig, A. C. S., Andringa, G., & Derntl, B. (2018). Potential adverse effects of violent video gaming: Interpersonal-affective traits are rather impaired than disinhibition in young adults.Frontiers in psychology,9. Kühn, S., Kugler, D. T., Schmalen, K., Weichenberger, M., Witt, C., & Gallinat, J. (2018). Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study.Molecular psychiatry, 1. Mammoser, G. (2018).Mental Health and Video Game Addiction. [online] Healthline. Available at: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/is-video-game-addiction-mental-health- issue#1 [Accessed 27 Feb. 2019].
6NEGATIVE EFFECT OF VIDEO GAMES ON CHILDREN Oliveira, M. (2018). Video game addiction concerns mental health experts. Retrieved from https://globalnews.ca/news/4122290/video-game-addiction-mental-health/ Terry, M., & Malik, A. (2018). Video Gaming as a Factor That Affects Academic Performance in Grade Nine.Online Submission.