Attitude change towards aggressive behaviors in adolescents

Abstract

Aggression and its relationship with violent video games have been studied for a long history. Among all different ages, adolescents might be an important group because they are at the stage of changing from childhood to adulthood, from immature to mature. More critically, adolescence is a stage of people to identify themselves. Their identification during this phase might be helpful in predicting their future behaviors and development. As empirical studies with comprehensive designs are critical to carry out effective research and obtain reliable data, a review has been made on a paper examining the relationship among aggression, violent video games, and wishful identification in adolescents. The review with modification could be helpful for future studies to investigating harmful consequences from violent video games on adolescents’ identification. This paper has identified two major problems of the study: one is its unclear causes of aggression - weather is due to violent element of games or the self-inference from characters’ appearance; the other is its problematic participants selecting. Suggestions have been given by providing more variations on games’ character appearance in order to deal with the causal problem. By increasing the sample size, the diversity of participants could be ensured, the sample could be more representative than before, and the problem could be solved.