TY  - JOUR
A1  - Busching, Robert
A1  - Krahé, Barbara
T1  - Charging neutral cues with aggressive meaning through violent video game play
JF  - Societies
N2  - When playing violent video games, aggressive actions are performed against the background of an originally neutral environment, and associations are formed between cues related to violence and contextual features. This experiment examined the hypothesis that neutral contextual features of a virtual environment become associated with aggressive meaning and acquire the function of primes for aggressive cognitions. Seventy-six participants were assigned to one of two violent video game conditions that varied in context (ship vs. city environment) or a control condition. Afterwards, they completed a Lexical Decision Task to measure the accessibility of aggressive cognitions in which they were primed either with ship-related or city-related words. As predicted, participants who had played the violent game in the ship environment had shorter reaction times for aggressive words following the ship primes than the city primes, whereas participants in the city condition responded faster to the aggressive words following the city primes compared to the ship primes. No parallel effect was observed for the non-aggressive targets. The findings indicate that the associations between violent and neutral cognitions learned during violent game play facilitate the accessibility of aggressive cognitions.
KW  - media violence
KW  - aggressive cognitions
KW  - associative networks
KW  - learning
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3390/soc3040445
SN  - 2075-4698
VL  - 3
IS  - 4
SP  - 445
EP  - 456
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Busching, Robert
A1  - Krahé, Barbara
T1  - Charging neutral cues with aggressive meaning through violent video game play
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - When playing violent video games, aggressive actions are performed against the background of an originally neutral environment, and associations are formed between cues related to violence and contextual features. This experiment examined the hypothesis that neutral contextual features of a virtual environment become associated with aggressive meaning and acquire the function of primes for aggressive cognitions. Seventy-six participants were assigned to one of two violent video game conditions that varied in context (ship vs. city environment) or a control condition. Afterwards, they completed a Lexical Decision Task to measure the accessibility of aggressive cognitions in which they were primed either with ship-related or city-related words. As predicted, participants who had played the violent game in the ship environment had shorter reaction times for aggressive words following the ship primes than the city primes, whereas participants in the city condition responded faster to the aggressive words following the city primes compared to the ship primes. No parallel effect was observed for the non-aggressive targets. The findings indicate that the associations between violent and neutral cognitions learned during violent game play facilitate the accessibility of aggressive cognitions.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 678 
KW  - media violence
KW  - aggressive cognitions
KW  - associative networks
KW  - learning
Y1  - 2020
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-476181
SN  - 1866-8364
IS  - 678
ER  -