E.A. Konijn

I Wish I Were a Warrior: The Role of Wishful Identification in the Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Adolescent Boys

This study tested the hypothesis that violent video games are especially likely to increase aggression when players identify with violent game characters. Dutch adolescent boys with low education ability (N=112) were randomly assigned to play a realistic or fantasy violent or nonviolent video game. Next, they competed with an ostensible partner on a reaction time task in which the winner could blast the loser with loud noise through headphones (the aggression measure). Participants were told that high noise levels could cause permanent hearing damage. Habitual video game exposure, trait aggressiveness, and sensation seeking were controlled for. As expected, the most aggressive participants were those who played a violent game and wished they were like a violent character in the game. These participants used noise levels loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage to their partners, even though their partners had not provoked them. These results show that identifying with violent video game characters makes players more aggressive. Players were especially likely to identify with violent characters in realistic games and with games they felt immersed in.

Some Like It Bad: Testing a Model for Perceiving and Experiencing Fictional Characters

We developed an encompassing theory that explains how readers of fiction and spectators of motion pictures establish affective relationships with fictional characters (FCs). The perceiving and experiencing fictional characters (PEFiC) theory is anchored in art perception, psychological aesthetics, and social and emotion psychology and addresses both the complexity and intrinsic affectivity involved in media exposure. In a between-subject design (N = 312), engagement and appreciation were measured as a function of the ethics (good vs. bad), aesthetics (beautiful vs. ugly), and epistemics (realistic vs. unrealistic) of eight protagonists in feature movies. The PEFiC model best fit the data with a unipolarity of factors and outperformed traditional theories (identification, empathy): The trade-off between involvement and distance explained the appreciation of FCs better than either distance or involvement alone. The mediators similarity, relevance, and valence exerted significant (interaction) effects, thus complicating the results. Furthermore, the effects of mediated bad persons differed strongly from ethically good ones.

Age and Violent-Content Labels Make Video Games Forbidden Fruits for Youth

OBJECTIVE. To protect minors from exposure to video games with objectionable content (eg, violence and sex), the Pan European Game Information developed a classification system for video games (eg, 18+). We tested the hypothesis that this classification system may actually increase the attractiveness of games for children younger than the age rating. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS. Participants were 310 Dutch youth. The design was a 3 (age group: 7–8, 12–13, and 16–17 years) × 2 (participant gender) × 7 (label: 7+, 12+, 16+, 18+, violence, no violence, or no label control) × 2 (game description: violent or nonviolent) mixed factorial. The first 2 factors were between subjects, whereas the last 2 factors were within subjects. Three personality traits (ie, reactance, trait aggressiveness, and sensation seeking) were also included in the analyses. Participants read fictitious video game descriptions and rated how much they wanted to play each game. RESULTS. Results revealed that restrictive age labels and violent-content labels increased the attractiveness of video games for all of the age groups (even 7- to 8-year-olds and girls). CONCLUSIONS. Although the Pan European Game Information system was developed to protect youth from objectionable content, this system actually makes such games forbidden fruits. Pediatricians should be aware of this forbidden-fruit effect, because video games with objectionable content can have harmful effects on children and adolescents.

Perceiving and experiencing fictional characters: an integrative account

:  Fictional characters (FCs) and mediated persons in literature, theater, film, art, TV, and digital media fulfill basic psychological functions, although the processes involved remain unspecified. Departing from identification and empathy hypotheses, a new context-sensitive model draws upon similarity studies, empirical aesthetics, persuasion, emotion, and social psychology. The Perceiving and Experiencing Fictional Characters model (PEFiC-model) has three phases. During encoding, observers judge FCs in terms of ethics (good-bad), aesthetics (beautiful-ugly), and epistemics (realistic-unrealistic). Comparison entails appraisals of personal relevance as well as valence towards and (dis)similarity between the dramatis personae and the self. In the response phase, appreciation of FCs is a trade-off between the parallel, unipolar processes of involvement and distance. Intricate involvement-distance conflicts occur when subjective norms disagree with ingroup norms. Furthermore, features participate in multiple (fuzzy) sets (e.g., partly good and partly bad). PEFiC can handle complex responses towards representations of (non-existent) others, such as attractive dissimilarity, the beauty in ugliness, the appeal of negative experiences, and fascination for evil, as well as mixed emotions, ambivalence, and neutral end-states that actually conceal emotional confusion.

Affective affordances: Improving interface character engagement through interaction

The nature of humans interacting with interface characters (e.g. embodied agents) is not well understood. The I-PEFiC model provides an integrative perspective on human-character interaction, assuming that the processes of engagement and user interaction exchange information in explaining user responses with interface characters. An experiment using the Sims2 game was conducted to test the effects of aesthetics (beautiful versus ugly, as engagement factor) and affordances (help versus obstacle, as interaction factor) of interface characters on use intentions, user engagement, and user satisfaction. Results of the experiment showed that (1) people tended to use helpful characters more than obstructing characters, (2) user engagement was enhanced by beauty and perceived affordance of the character whereas (3) intentions to use the character were not affected by good looks, and (4) the most satisfied users were those that were engaged with the character as well as willing to use it. This stresses the importance of enhancing affordances so to increase user engagement with interface characters. The I-PEFiC model provided a valuable framework to study the (interdependent) effects of relevant factors in human-character interaction.

The Appeal of Violent Video Games to Lower Educated Aggressive Adolescent Boys from Two Countries

The objective of this study was to test the effect of individual differences on appeal and use of video games. Participants were 299 adolescent boys from lower and higher secondary schools in the Netherlands and Belgium. In general, boys were most attracted to violent video games. Boys that scored higher in trait aggressiveness and lower in empathy were especially attracted to violent games and spent more time playing video games than did boys lower in trait aggressiveness. Lower educated boys showed more appreciation for both violent and nonviolent games and spent more time playing them than did higher educated boys. The present study showed that aggressive and less empathic boys were most attracted to violent games. The fact that heavy users of violent games show less empathy and higher aggressiveness suggests the possibility of desensitization. Other studies have shown that playing violent games increases aggressiveness and decreases empathy. These results combined suggest the possibility of a violence cycle. Aggressive individuals are attracted to violent games. Playing violent games increases aggressiveness and decreases empathy, which in turn leads to increased appreciation and use of violent games.

Daily suppression of discrete emotions during the work of police service workers and criminal investigation officers.

The aim of the present research among Dutch police officers was to examine whether fluctuations in emotional job demands predict exhaustion through the suppression of discrete emotions. A first diary study (N =25) tested how the suppression of discrete emotions is related to exhaustion at the end of the work shift of police call-center service workers. Results revealed that suppressing anger was positively related to exhaustion at the end of a work shift, whereas suppressing happiness was not. A second study (N=41) among criminal investigation officers showed that the emotions anger, abhorrence, and sadness were among the most common negative emotions that were suppressed as part of the emotional labor of this specialized occupational group. Results of a third (diary) study (N=39) confirmed that emotional dissonance and more particularly the suppression of abhorrence mediated the relationship between emotional job demands and exhaustion at the end of a work shift.

'We don’t need no education': video game preferences, video game motivations, and aggressiveness among adolescent boys of different educational ability levels

This research focuses on low educational ability as a risk factor for aggression and violent game play. We propose that boys of lower educational ability are more attracted to violent video games than other boys are, and that they are also higher in trait aggressiveness and sensation seeking. Participants were Dutch boys in public schools (N = 830, age-range 11-17). In the Netherlands, standardized tests are used to place students into lower, medium, and higher educational ability groups. Results showed that boys in the lower educational ability group preferred to play violent, stand-alone games, identified more with video game characters, and perceived video games to be more realistic than other boys did. Lower levels of education were also related to higher levels of aggressiveness and sensation seeking. Higher educational ability boys preferred social, multiplayer games. Within a risk and resilience model, boys with lower educational ability are at greater risk for aggression.

Spotlight on spectators; emotions in the theater

In investigating theater spectators and their aesthetic experiences, a sociological and a psychological orientation on contemporary theater research were compared. Field studies usually concern sociological variables (e.g., age, education, and appreciation). If occasionally the spectators emotional experience is explored, the Aristotelian viewpoint prevails, resulting in the identification hypothesis. This study opts for a broader perspective based on contemporary emotion psychology. Over 350 spectators completed a questionnaire that represented viewpoints from sociological, psychological, and theater studies perspectives. High‐status audiences found the selected performances neither complex nor unconventional and hardly experienced identification emotions but rather experienced empathy and positive task emotions. Their overall appreciation referred mainly to the actors performance, which was also the strongest source for spectators’ emotions in the theater.

YouTube as a Research Tool: Three Approaches

The present paper provides empirical data to support the use of social media as research environment. YouTube was chosen as a most appropriate format to target adolescents in experimental and cross-sectional designs given its popularity as well as its plasticity. We uniquely applied the YouTube format as (a) an environment to present manipulated media materials in controlled experimental designs; (b) an environment to study effects of peer feedback on various media contents; (c) a format to design a media-based questionnaire, specifically, the Media, Morals and Youth Questionnaire (MMaYQue). Various studies have been conducted that demonstrate the appropriateness of our YouTube transformations for each of these three purposes. The focus in the present paper is on the methodology of these studies to illustrate how we effectively transformed YouTube as a research tool.