The psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic emotional responses to violent video game events.

Abstract

The authors examined emotional valence- and arousal-related phasic psychophysiological responses to different violent events in the first-person shooter video game "James Bond 007: NightFire" among 36 young adults. Event-related changes in zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and orbicularis oculi electromyographic (EMG) activity and skin conductance level (SCL) were recorded, and the participants rated their emotions and the trait psychoticism based on the Psychoticism dimension of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire--Revised, Short Form. Wounding and killing the opponent elicited an increase in SCL and a decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity. The decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi activity was less pronounced among high Psychoticism scorers compared with low Psychoticism scorers. The wounding and death of the player's own character (James Bond) elicited an increase in SCL and zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity and a decrease in corrugator activity. Instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent may elicit high-arousal negative affect (anxiety), with high Psychoticism scorers experiencing less anxiety than low Psychoticism scorers. Although counterintuitive, the wounding and death of the player's own character may increase some aspect of positive emotion.

Generic Physiological Features as Predictors of Player Experience

“…playing with friends or strangers [13]), game events (e.g. killing an enemy [14]) and game features (e.g. camera viewpoint [3]) to the player's state.…”

Naturalistic emotional speech collection paradigm with online game and its psychological and acoustical assessment

“…The paradigm adopts a MMORPG as the task for speakers to induce their emotion. The effect of a game to induce emotion was proved in earlier studies [20][21][22][23][24][25]. Emotion expressivity is the characteristic that vocal expression is influenced by induced emotion.…”

“…To induce speaker's emotion, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) is adopted with reference to the research on emotion and decision making [20][21][22] and emotion studies for entertainment computing [23][24][25], and the subject's emotional response to the game is successfully induced. As our analytical interest is focused on speech, our goal is not just to induce the speaker's emotion but also to record naturalistic expressive utterances containing spontaneous emotion evoked in a usual environment for speakers.…”

A Biofeedback Game with Physical Actions

“…In such games, the player completes game stages when he or she strives to relax through mental concentration. Most theorists endorse the view that emotions comprise three components: subjective experience (e.g., feeling joyous), expressive behavior (e.g., smiling), and a physiological component (e.g., sympathetic arousal); others add motivational state or action tendency and/or cognitive processing to that list [5]. However, most BF games have been regarded as merely instruments for the user's health.…”