Chronic exposure to violence kills empathy, ability to process emotions: Study finds violent video games change young people’s brains

Violent video games are often thought of as encouraging anti-social, aggressive behavior; new research has suggested that they can do so much more. The investigators behind a recent study have found that prolonged exposure to violent video games may actually impact people on a neural level, resulting in reduced empathy and increased emotional callousness.

In order to come to this conclusion, participants were first recruited through an online questionnaire. They were then classified as either frequent or infrequent video game players, depending on how much time in a single week they devoted to gaming. Five hours of playing video games a week was considered infrequent, while 30 hours was deemed frequent. Following this, the researchers took note of the top three video games played by the participants to discern the violent (such as “Call of Duty”) from the non-violent (namely “FIFA”).