This is the first discussion of this oft-emotional topic that I feel corresponds to my first hand experience... "Study finds stable personalities unaffected by violent games."
John Timmer in ars technica: "Those of you who have followed the literature examining potential connections between violent video games and real-world violence know that the evidence for such a connection is pretty tenuous. Studies purporting to show such a connection appear on a regular basis, often alternating with other studies that suggest that the connection is illusory. If it's any consolation, researchers in the field find the contradictory results just as confusing as you do, and some have called for efforts to be focused on understanding the reasons underlying the confusion. A paper that's in press at Psychology, Crime & Law claims to have accomplished just that.
The authors ... designed a study in which measures of anger levels acted as a proxy for violent behavior. They recruited 135 children, but were forced to kick some out of the study due to bad behavior, leaving them with about 110 boys and 15 girls with a mean age of 14.6 years, all of them familiar with the game of choice, Quake II. The children were given personality profile tests and measured for anger levels, at which point they were set loose for 20 minutes of gaming. Anger levels were measured again following the gaming session.
Crunching the numbers indicated that there were three clear groups. The anger levels of 77 of the subjects remained unchanged after the gaming session. In 22 of the subjects, anger levels nearly doubled from a starting point similar to that of the unaffected children. But 8 of the test subjects started out at this high anger level; for them, 20 minutes of gaming dropped them down to levels similar to those seen in the unaffected group.
The research team then correlated these groups with the personality profiles, and an clear pattern emerged. Those with personalities that were scored as stable largely wound up in the unaffected group, while the remaining two groups were populated by personalities that were considered less stable.
The authors propose that gamers fall into two groups: stable personalities, and those with emotional states that are susceptible to being influenced by game play. Within the latter group, the response to violent games largely depends on the emotional states of the gamers when they begin play. Angry gamers will cool off, calm gamers will get agitated. They also note that only two of the cases of rising anger reached levels that would be considered cause for concern, suggesting that dangerous levels of anger were rarely triggered by gaming..."
Picture by basia an der bar, reprinted under Creative Commons license.