Psychology: April 2008 Archive Page

The WashPo ruminates on the social significance of the activities of the brain-eating collegiate undead.

The 2005 inaugural Zombies game drew about 70 Goucher students. Since then, as many as 200 have played, making it one of the most popular student activities -- even though it's not an official student activity -- among the school's roughly 1,500 students. The game has spread to other campuses, with thousands of students playing this month at Cornell University, Penn State University, Bowling Green State University and the University of Maryland, among others.

But as Zombies' popularity has grown, criticism of it has grown, too -- especially since last April, when a severely disturbed English major named Seung Hui Cho armed himself with two semiautomatic handguns and killed 33 people, including himself, at Virginia Tech University. In the immediate wake of that shooting, Humans vs. Zombies became controversial, raising a collegiate version of the prevailing question of our time: What is the balance between security and freedom? And it prompts another fascinating question: What can a group of young people learn about one

Yesterday was my daughter's sixth birthday. My wife told me that there was a horrific meltdown at the store when the ice cream cake they picked up did not match the picture in the catalog.  Screams, tears, and a half hour of sobbing.

Last night, I told my daughter the story of The Birthday Party of Smart Carolyn from the Moon (Smart Carolyn is the character my daughter identifies with in the Captain Rod Gearhart steampunk stories I tell her at bedtime).  Smart Carolyn was disappointed that her Moon birthday cake wasn't what she expected, and had a temper tantrum in the Moon supply depot.  I told her about the Moon supply clerk who had traveled to five different supply posts searching for the right color frosting, and who felt very, very sad that Smart Carolyn from the Moon didn't even say thank you. 

My daughter sniffled a little in the dark, and then she continued the story for me: "And then Smart Carolyn from the Moon got over it, and realized that the store clerk had tried her best, and that's what was really important. And the cake was delicious."

So this morning I was in a pensive mood when I came across this blog, "Lies I've told my 3 year old recently."

Everyone knows at least one secret language.

When nobody is looking, I can fly.

We are all held together by invisible threads.

Books get lonely too.

Sadness can be eaten.

The very last one on the list is the reason I blogged it. But I didn't include it here... go read it over on Heading East.

The abstract from a psychology conference presentation that argues World of Warcraft lowers the anger levels of players is getting a lot of attention online.  The term "sex" (which appears in the title paired with "violence") seems to mean "gender" in the abstract, so the title may be a bit misleading. I haven't heard from anyone who attended the conference presentation, and neither have I read the full study.

Sex and violence and playing games: reduced levels of anger after violent online play
Jane Barnett, Mark Coulson, Nigel Foreman, Middlesex University

Objectives: This study had two main aims. First, to explore the types of anger-causing scenarios experienced when playing WoW. Second, to identify the state emotions experienced before and after the anger-causing scenarios, as a function of sex and personality.

Design: Male and female WoW players (aged between 12 and 83 years) provided examples of anger-causing scenarios they experienced while playing the game (these scenarios formed the World of Warcraft Questionnaire: WoWQ). These scenarios plus other questionnaires examining anger, aggression, and personality, were administered as an online survey. Respondents completed state and trait mood measures, played WoW for a minimum of two hours, and then completed the state measures again. Participants also reported situations ingame that had made them feel angry or aggressive.

Method: Participants were recruited using the official WoW gaming forums. The forum post provided players with a link that took them to the introductory page of the survey. The final number of respondents was 292.

Results: Principal components analyses found a structure identifying four main anger-causing themes in WoW. Correlational and regression analyses examined the relationships between these WoW scenarios, and the emotional and personality constructs of participants. Mixed ANOVAs examined differences between male and female state moods before and after playing WoW. Results suggest that although online gamers are more likely to feel calm or tired after playing, the post-WoW mood state is dependent on sex, age, and personality.

Conclusions: The identification of a specific gamer personality type helped to outline the possible benefits and risks of these individuals who play video games. A standardised questionnaire was developed to examine the concepts investigated in this research, i.e. how anger and aggression vary as a function of personality, sex, and age, in gamers and non-gamers. This study improved the understanding of and the ability to respond effectively to public health threats that arise from playing computer games, and encouraged more responsible communication regarding these issues.

Someone is going to use this incident as evidence to support the claim that social networking websites are dangerous.

Lindsay's father said the teens attacked her to make a video that might become popular on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. But the mother of one of the girls arrested said Lindsay had provoked the other teens by threatening and insulting them on the MySpace social-networking Web site.

Teenagers use social networking websites. Teenagers commit crimes. As more teens use social networking websites, more teens who use social networking websites will commit crimes. No matter who started what, nobody deserves to be beaten up for a half hour.  But look on the bright side... thanks to the hubris of whoever posted the video to YouTube, the lawyers for the defense will have a much, much harder time in court.

A good analysis from Cory Doctorow:

Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.