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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.
A growing body of research has demonstrated negative effects of sexualization in the media on adolescents' body image, but longitudinal studies and research including interactive and social media are scarce. The current study explored the longitudinal associations of adolescents' use of sexualized video games (SVG) and sexualized Instagram images (SII) with body image concerns. Specifically, our study examined relations between adolescents' SVG and SII use and appearance comparisons, thin- and muscular-ideal internalization, valuing appearance over competence, and body surveillance. A sample of 660 German adolescents (327 female, 333 male;M-age = 15.09 years) participated in two waves with an interval of 6 months. A structural equation model showed that SVG and SII use at Time 1 predicted body surveillance indirectly via valuing appearance over competence at Time 2. Furthermore, SVG and SII use indirectly predicted both thin- and muscular-ideal internalization through appearance comparisons at Time 1. In turn, thin-ideal internalization at Time 1 predicted body surveillance indirectly via valuing appearance over competence at Time 2. The results indicate that sexualization in video games and on Instagram can play an important role in increasing body image concerns among adolescents. We discuss the findings with respect to objectification theory and the predictive value of including appearance comparisons in models explaining the relation between sexualized media and self-objectification.