Emotion perception in habitual players of action video games.

Abstract

Action video game players (AVGPs) display superior performance in various aspects of cognition, especially in perception and top-down attention. The existing literature has examined these performance almost exclusively with stimuli and tasks devoid of any emotional content. Thus, whether the superior performance documented in the cognitive domain extend to the emotional domain remains unknown. We present 2 cross-sectional studies contrasting AVGPs and nonvideo game players (NVGPs) in their ability to perceive facial emotions. Under an enhanced perception account, AVGPs should outperform NVGPs when processing facial emotion. Yet, alternative accounts exist. For instance, under some social accounts, exposure to action video games, which often contain violence, may lower sensitivity for empathy-related expressions such as sadness, happiness, and pain while increasing sensitivity to aggression signals. Finally, under the view that AVGPs excel at learning new tasks (in contrast to the view that they are immediately better at all new tasks), the use of stimuli that participants are already experts at predicts little to no group differences. Study 1 uses drift-diffusion modeling and establishes that AVGPs are comparable to NVGPs in every decision-making stage mediating the discrimination of facial emotions, despite showing group difference in aggressive behavior. Study 2 uses the reverse inference technique to assess the mental representation of facial emotion expressions, and again documents no group differences. These results indicate that the perceptual benefits associated with action video game play do not extend to overlearned stimuli such as facial emotion, and rather indicate equivalent facial emotion skills in AVGPs and NVGPs.

Insensitive Players? A Relationship Between Violent Video Game Exposure and Recognition of Negative Emotions

“…These results were further supported in a follow-up experiment: after 15 min of violent gameplay participants recognized angry emotional expressions faster than happy faces compared to those in the non-violent game condition (Kirsh and Mounts, 2007). In contrast, studies by Pichon et al (2020) did not find a statistically significant relationship between habitual violent video gaming and accuracy in recognition of positive and negative facial expressions.…”

“…In this research, they did not find a statistically significant relationship between VVGE and recognition of facial expressions. However, in our studies, we used a slightly more sensitive measure of VVGE, whereas Pichon et al (2020) dichotomized VVGE based on more complex criteria than in our studies. However, our study could not assess the direction of the relationship given the correlational nature.…”

“…Most of the previous studies focused on how fast players could identify emotions or how they allocate attention to happy faces. The study by Diaz et al (2016) examined the accuracy of recognition of emotional expressions providing mixed evidence, but the studies by Pichon et al (2020) found not significant differences in accuracy of facial expressions recognition between habitual players of violent games and nonvideo game players. Based on that and the fact that ability to recognize negative emotions could prevent violent or anti-social behavior (Blair, 1995;Blair et al, 2001), the relationship between VVGE and recognition of negative emotions needs a further investigation.…”

“…We consider the results we found as general for negative emotions. As the recent studies by Pichon et al (2020) showed, accounting for the differences between facial expressions of various emotions or the magnitude of the expressions, could lead to a comprehensive view on the relationship between VVGE and recognition of emotion as expressed in the face. In this research, they did not find a statistically significant relationship between VVGE and recognition of facial expressions.…”

Whose emotion is it? Perspective matters to understand brain-body interactions in emotions

“…Indeed, while reciprocal influences between emotion and cognition have long been acknowledged, common building blocks across domains remain scarce -for instance, evidence accumulation, a central mechanism in perception and cognition, is only beginning to be acknowledged in the emotion literature (e.g. Givon, Itzhak-Raz, Karmon-Presser, Danieli, & Meiran, 2019;Grèzes et al, 2021;Mennella, Vilarem, & Grèzes, 2020;Pichon et al, 2021;Roberts & Hutcherson, 2019;Tipples, 2018;Yang, Brunet-Gouet, Burca, Kalunga, & Amorim, 2020).…”