Violent video games linked to child aggression

The article, at http://edition.cnn.com/...">http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/family/11/03/healthmag.violent.video...., says that:

Quote:Kids in both the U.S. and Japan who reported playing lots of violent video games had more aggressive behavior months later than their peers who did not, according to the study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The researchers specifically tried to get to the root of the chicken-or-egg problem -- do children become more aggressive after playing video games or are aggressive kids more attracted to violent videos?

It's a murky -- and controversial -- issue. ...

Later, it gives provides some of the study details:

Quote:In the new study, Dr. Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D., of Iowa State University in Ames, and his colleagues looked at how children and teen's video game habits at one time point related to their behavior three to six months later.

The study included three groups of kids: 181 Japanese students ages 12 to 15; 1,050 Japanese students aged 13 to 18; and 364 U.S. kids ages 9 to 12.

The U.S. children listed their three favorite games and how often they played them. In the younger Japanese group, the researchers looked at how often the children played five different violent video game genres (fighting action, shooting, adventure, among others); in the older group they gauged the violence in the kids' favorite game genres and the time they spent playing them each week.

Japanese children rated their own behavior in terms of physical aggression, such as hitting, kicking or getting into fights with other kids; the U.S. children rated themselves too, but the researchers took into account reports from their peers and teachers as well.

In every group, children who were exposed to more video game violence did become more aggressive over time than their peers who had less exposure. This was true even after the researchers took into account how aggressive the children were at the beginning of the study -- a strong predictor of future bad behavior.

The findings are "pretty good evidence" that violent video games do indeed cause aggressive behavior, says Dr. L. Rowell Huesmann, director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor.

Although this seems like a quite well-done scientific study and that, thus, it provides rather good evidence of video games being a causative factor in real-life violence, I also realize that it is a controversial topic and, as later stated in the article, not every one agrees. However, I am glad to see that quality research like this is being done to not only help answer this question more definitively, but also other related ones such as how much of a factor is video game violence for different groups of kids (e.g., ones who were violent beforehand versus ones who were not), whether or not different types of video game violence make a difference, what the other correlative factors are, etc.