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Do video games make children to be cruel and violent?
We have different unfortunate news in our world every day. For example, homicides, car
accidents, manslaughters, and suicides are being more and more common. Recently, the age of
committers is getting younger and younger. It even happens between children. According to the
CBC News, the youngest killer in Canada is just six years old, who killed another six years old
kid. (CBC News) Therefore, people began to concern about the reason of it. Some people come
up with the ideas of video games. Elisa Hae-Jung Song is a clinical instructor of pediatrics at
Mount Zion Medical Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Jane Anderson is an
associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the same institution. They wrote an article called How
violent video games may violate children’s health in Contemporary Pediatrics in 2001. In this
article, they tried to find out if the video games could be a cause of concern. They suggested that
numerous studies have found a correlation to prove violent content video games increase
children’s aggression. Moreover, they think that some popular video games may even teach
children how to kill by simulating the techniques for the combat. They related the recent school
shootings to this topic. They suggest that those shooters were heavy users of video games. Song
and Anderson advised that parents should avoid their children to play those games to protect
them from violence.(Anderson, Elisa) Since that, people think that the video games play the
violence up, which makes children think that it is common and easy to kill someone. They
misunderstand the value of a person’s life. Therefore, the parents began to boycott the video
games include the violence such as Grand Theft Auto, Counter Strike. However, the video game
manufacturers do not agree with it. They suggest that the children killing is because of their
family. They do not educate their children well enough. Since both sides have their points to
fight against each other, so do video games really make children to be cruel and violent?
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In this question, the specialists and researchers have some different opinions and results
of researches. In the article Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive
Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic
Review of the Scientific Literature written by Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman, they agreed
with some researches on exposure to television and movie that video games with violent content
will definitely affect children’s mind. Anderson and Bushman are from the Psychological Science
department of Iowa State University. They did many researches about how the media affect
people. In this topic, they used both experimental and non-experimental studies to find out the
result, which shows that violent content video games can increase physiological arousal and
aggression-related thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, the violent content video games
