ABSTRACT
People, especially parents, are usually concerned about controlling the media their children see and play—the idea being that overly violent or sexual media might have a deleterious effect on development or behavior. Participants were tested individually. They were told that the researchers were studying what types of people liked various types of video games. Violent video games known to produce physiological desensitization influenced helping behavior and related perceptual and cognitive variables. Staging the emergency before the movie allowed us to test (and control) the helpfulness of people attending violent versus nonviolent movies. If the theoretical model adequately accounts for differences among observed means, then the specific contrast should be significant and the residual between-groups variance should be nonsignificant.
