Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson has made much of his life’s work studying how violent video game play affects youth behavior. And he says a new study he led, analyzing 130 research reports on more than 130,000 subjects worldwide, proves conclusively that exposure to violent video games makes more aggressive, less caring kids — regardless of their age, sex or culture.
The study was published today in the March 2010 issue of the
Craig Anderson , an Iowa State Distinguished Professor of psychology who co-authored a previous book on violent video games' effects with ISU researchers, is now lead author on a study that provides comprehensive analysis of previous literature about the effects of playing violent video games. Photo by Bob Elbert, News Service
Psychological Bulletin, an American Psychological Association journal. It reports that exposure to violent video games is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive thoughts and behavior, and decreased empathy and prosocial behavior in youths.
“We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method — that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal — and regardless of the cultures tested in this study [East and West], you get the same effects,” said Anderson, who is also director of Iowa State’s Center for the Study of Violence. “And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts. Such exposure also increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior.”
The study was conducted by a team of eight researchers, including ISU psychology graduate students Edward Swing and Muniba Saleem; and Brad Bushman, a former Iowa State psychology professor who now is on the faculty at the University of Michigan. Also on the team were the top video game researchers from Japan – Akiko Shibuya from Keio University and Nobuko Ihori from Ochanomizu University – and Hannah Rothstein, a noted scholar on meta-analytic review from the City University of New York.
Meta-analytic procedure used in research
The team used meta-analytic procedures — the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature — to test the effects of violent video game play on the behaviors, thoughts and feelings of the individuals, ranging from elementary school-aged children to college undergraduates.
The research also included new longitudinal data which provided further confirmation that playing violent video games is a causal risk factor for long-term harmful outcomes.
“These are not huge effects — not on the order of joining a gang vs. not joining a gang,” said Anderson. “But these effects are also not trivial in size. It is one risk factor for future aggression and other sort of negative outcomes. And it’s a risk factor that’s easy for an individual parent to deal with — at least, easier than changing most other known risk factors for aggression and violence, such as poverty or one’s genetic structure.”
The analysis found that violent video game effects are significant in both Eastern and Western cultures, in males and females, and in all age groups. Although there are good theoretical reasons to expect the long-term harmful effects to be higher in younger, pre-teen youths, there was only weak evidence of such age effects.
Time to refocus the public policy debate
The researchers conclude that the study has important implications for public policy debates, including development and testing of potential intervention strategies designed to reduce the harmful effects of playing violent video games.
“From a public policy standpoint, it’s time to get off the question of, ‘Are there real and serious effects?’ That’s been answered and answered repeatedly,” Anderson said. “It’s now time to move on to a more constructive question like, ‘How do we make it easier for parents — within the limits of culture, society and law — to provide a healthier childhood for their kids?’”
But Anderson knows it will take time for the creation and implementation of effective new policies. And until then, there is plenty parents can do to protect their kids at home.
“Just like your child’s diet and the foods you have available for them to eat in the house, you should be able to control the content of the video games they have available to play in your home,” he said. “And you should be able to explain to them why certain kinds of games are not allowed in the house — conveying your own values. You should convey the message that one should always be looking for more constructive solutions to disagreements and conflict.”
Anderson says the new study may be his last meta-analysis on violent video games because of its definitive findings. Largely because of his extensive work on violent video game effects, Anderson was chosen as one of the three 2010 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist Lecturers. He will give a lecture at October’s New England Psychological Association (NEPA) meeting in Colchester, Vt.
Progress towards the creation of 10,000 new jobs for young people in the cultural and sports sectors is now well past the half way mark, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Ben Bradshaw announced today.
Nine months after the Government first announced plans to fund employment opportunities for young people who might otherwise be struggling to find work, DCMS has secured funding for more than 6,500 posts in the sports and cultural sectors.
A diverse range of projects have received funding in recent months, including: sports coaches and leisure centre workers; apprentices in theatres; internships with arts organisations; and support roles in museums and galleries.
Visiting Future Jobs Fund recruits in Leicester today, Ben Bradshaw said:
“Jobs in the cultural and sports sectors can be hard to come by. It’s often the case that the supply of potential employees outstrips demand, so it can be particularly hard for young people with little experience who are keen to take their first steps into the world of work.
“Today I have met some young people who are very excited about their new jobs, but these unique opportunities would not have been possible without the Future Jobs Fund.
“We started with a target of between five and ten thousand new jobs in our sectors, and I am confident we will end up with a figure far higher than that.”
Examples of successful bids include:
Thirty new staff starting at Southbank Centre in March, involved in a wide range of activities from welcoming visitors to behind the scenes support. Southbank Centre was one of the first organisations to bid for jobs through the Future Jobs Fund, in collaboration with youth organisation SE1 United and New Deal of the Mind, a coalition that aims to help boost the UK economy by developing jobs in the creative industries.
Fifty six jobs working for a disability-led theatre group in Essex. Theatre Resource, based in Ongar, is an arts organisation specialising in disability arts and social inclusion. Also co-ordinated by New Deal of the Mind, jobs include community craft workers, marketing assistants and arts programme workers.
Two hundred jobs across the West Midlands, co-ordinated by the Skills Partnership and making a major contribution towards the region’s Olympics legacy. Working as School Physical Activity Co-ordinators in Birmingham, Walsall, Sandwell, Solihull and Dudley, these jobs involve working alongside teaching staff engaging young people in physical activities in breakfast, lunch and after school clubs.
The Future Jobs Fund (FJF) is a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) initiative that aims to create 170,000 new jobs for young people, 10,000 of which will be from DCMS sectors. Five thousand of these will be in the cultural sector and 5,000 in the sports sector.
As the world watches the Vancouver Olympics, researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and Children’s Hospital Boston have teamed up to monitor and assess potential infectious disease threats to Vancouver during the Winter Games by integrating two independently developed intelligence systems that focus on global infectious diseases; bio.DIASPORA and HealthMap.
The communicating systems, developed by two Canadians – Dr. Kamran Khan at St. Michael’s and Dr. John Brownstein of the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston – are now producing the first, real-time analyses on potential threats to mass gatherings. The collaboration, and corresponding analysis of threats to the Olympic Games, is described in an article published online by the Canadian Medical Association Journal today.
“Mass gatherings can potentially amplify and disperse infectious disease threats globally because they can draw millions of people from around the world into a single space,” says Dr. Kamran Khan, an infectious disease physician and scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital. “By enabling our two systems to communicate in real-time, we are exploring new ways to generate actionable intelligence to organizers of mass gatherings.”
Dr. Khan is the developer of bio.DIASPORA, which enables the study of global air traffic patterns and applies this knowledge to help the world’s cities and countries better prepare for and respond to emerging infectious diseases threats. Dr. Brownstein is a co-founder of HealthMap, an online global disease-tracking and mapping tool which leverages information sources on the Internet to detect infectious disease outbreaks around the world.
For the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Dr. Khan analyzed recent worldwide air traffic patterns during the month of February, to predict where passengers travelling into Vancouver would be originating from. His team found that nearly two-thirds of all international passengers traveling to Vancouver came from just 25 cities. Dr. Brownstein’s team then concentrated its infectious disease surveillance efforts on those cities, which it continues to do on an hourly basis during the course of the Winter Games (a real-time view of this analysis is available online at http://www.healthmap.org/olympics).
“Internet-based, geographically-directed infectious disease surveillance may greatly compliment traditional preparations for infectious disease threats at mass gatherings by identifying infectious disease at their source and potentially preventing importation/exportation of infection among attendees,” explains Dr. Brownstein at Children’s Hospital. “We look forward to continued research and dialogue in this area and seeing how the information we glean from monitoring these Games may be useful in terms of preparing for future mass gatherings like the upcoming G20 Summit in Ontario, Canada and this year’s FIFA World Cup in South Africa.”
Ancient human teeth are telling secrets that may relate to modern-day health: Some stressful events that occurred early in development are linked to shorter life spans.
“Prehistoric remains are providing strong, physical evidence that people who acquired tooth enamel defects while in the womb or early childhood tended to die earlier, even if they survived to adulthood,” says Emory University anthropologist George Armelagos.
Armelagos led a systematic review of defects in teeth enamel and early mortality recently published in Evolutionary Anthropology. The paper is the first summary of prehistoric evidence for the Barker hypothesis – the idea that many adult diseases originate during fetal development and early childhood.
“Teeth are like a snapshot into the past,” Armelagos says. “Since the chronology of enamel development is well known, it’s possible to determine the age at which a physiological disruption occurred. The evidence is there, and it’s indisputable.”
The Barker hypothesis is named after epidemiologist David Barker, who during the 1980s began studying links between early infant health and later adult health. The theory, also known as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease Hypothesis (DOHaD), has expanded into wide acceptance.
As one of the founders of the field of bioarcheology, Armelagos studies skeletal remains to understand how diet and disease affected populations. Tooth enamel can give a particularly telling portrait of physiological events, since the enamel is secreted in a regular, ring-like fashion, starting from the second trimester of fetal development. Disruptions in the formation of the enamel, which can be caused by disease, poor diet or psychological stress, show up as grooves on the tooth surface.
Armelagos and other bioarcheologists have noted the connection between dental enamel and early mortality for years. For the Evolutionary Biology paper, Armelagos led a review of the evidence from eight published studies, applying the lens of the Barker hypothesis to remains dating back as far as 1 million years.
One study of a group of Australopithecines from the South African Pleistocence showed a nearly 12-year decrease in mean life expectancy associated with early enamel defects. In another striking example, remains from Dickson Mounds, Illinois, showed that individuals with teeth marked by early life stress lived 15.4 years less than those without the defects.
“During prehistory, the stresses of infectious disease, poor nutrition and psychological trauma were likely extreme. The teeth show the impact,” Armelagos says.
Until now, teeth have not been analyzed using the Barker hypothesis, which has mainly been supported by a correlation between birth weight in modern-day, high-income populations and ailments like diabetes and heart disease.
“The prehistoric data suggests that this type of dental evidence could be applied in modern populations, to give new insights into the scope of the Barker hypothesis,” Armelagos says. “Bioarcheology is yielding lessons that are still relevant today in the many parts of the world in which infectious diseases and under-nutrition are major killers.”
Cause: Many athlete training programs based on research using male athletes
Female athletes experience dramatically higher rates of specific musculoskeletal injuries and medical conditions compared to male athletes, according to exercise physiologist Vicki Harber in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta.
According to her paper, depending on the sport, there can be a two- to sixfold difference in these types of injuries between male and female athletes. That’s because many training programs developed for female athletes are built on research using young adult males and don’t take the intrinsic biological differences between the sexes into account.
Harber has authored a comprehensive guide for coaches, parents and administrators, entitled The Female Athlete Perspective, and published by Canadian Sport for Life (CS4L), which addresses these and other medical issues known to influence women’s participation in sport.
The paper is based on a thorough review of the current literature on the subject, Harber’s extensive knowledge as a researcher in female athlete health and her work in the development of female athletes.
Musculoskeletal injuries, particularly knee and shoulder injuries, are most prevalent, with increased probability of re-injury, says Harber, noting that many of these injuries are preventable. Building awareness about appropriate support for young female athletes and changes to training programs are critical to help them reach their athletic and personal potential, injury-free.
Harber found the risk of the Female Athlete Triad—three separate but interrelated conditions of disordered eating, amenorrhea and osteoporosis—is another area that urgently needs attention for young female athletes.
For female athletes to thrive injury-free, attention must be paid to their proper nutrition to ensure both the athletic performance and healthy reproductive performance associated with bone health and overall wellbeing, Harber found.
Scientists are reporting the first evidence from human research that blueberries — one of the richest sources of healthful antioxidants and other so-called phytochemicals — improve memory. They said the study establishes a basis for comprehensive human clinical trials to determine whether blueberries really deserve their growing reputation as a memory enhancer. A report on the study appears in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.
Robert Krikorian and colleagues point out that previous studies in laboratory animals suggest that eating blueberries may help boost memory in the aged. Until now, however, there had been little scientific work aimed at testing the effect of blueberry supplementation on memory in people.
In the study, one group of volunteers in their 70s with early memory decline drank the equivalent of 2-2 l/2 cups of a commercially available blueberry juice every day for two months. A control group drank a beverage without blueberry juice. The blueberry juice group showed significant improvement on learning and memory tests, the scientists say. “These preliminary memory findings are encouraging and suggest that consistent supplementation with blueberries may offer an approach to forestall or mitigate neurodegeneration,” said the report. The research involved scientists from the University of Cincinnati, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Canadian department of agriculture.
