“The Affects of Reward and Punishment in Violent Video Games on Aggressive Affect, Cognition, and Behavior” Annotation

Anderson, Craig, and Nicholas Carnagey. "The Effects of Reward and Punishment in Violent Video Games on Aggressive Affect, Cognition, and Behavior." Psychological Science 16.11 (2005): 882-889.

“The Affects of Reward and Punishment in Violent Video Games on Aggressive Affect, Cognition, and Behavior” is an article that focuses on an experiment that examines how rewarding violent actions in a video game may have a continuing affect in aggression related traits. The research experiment required 80 participants to play one of three versions of a video game. The game was Carmageddon 2, the researchers had one version where violence was rewarded, one where it was punished, and the last version did not contain violence. The researched let them play the games for 20 minutes then measured aggressive affects, aggressive cognition, and aggressive behavior. They found where violence was rewarded all three areas of aggression increased, punishing violent behavior only increased hostile emotion and the non violent game did not increase any of the three. This research was a good model of the affects of violent video games on aggressiveness in players. The research supported increased aggression and also refuted excuses of increased aggression like the argument that competitiveness increases the aggression not violence.

This article, which contained a lot of pertinent research sources, was a well written and well researched article telling about the increased levels of aggression are affected by violent video games. My favorite part because of its usefulness is how it showed other reasons aggression levels may be increased but then, through research, it eliminated these theories from truth. I don’t think there is any way you can say there is one truth but it did a good job arguing for the side the research supported. This article added a few subjects I can discuss and try to find a truth about in my paper. It will help the content of my paper much better.