TY - JOUR
T1 - Using video games to understand sex differences in attentional biases for weapons
AU - van Heyst, Gemma
AU - Shin, Myoungju
AU - Sulikowski, Danielle
N1 - Funding Information:
Charles Sturt University provided funding to support publication. No additional external funding was received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2022 van Heyst et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - Attentional biases for threatening stimuli of various kinds have been repeatedly demonstrated. More recently, sex differences in the strength of visual biases for weapons have been observed, with men exhibiting stronger biases than do women. In the current study we further explored this sex difference, by examining how immediate vicarious experience with weapons (via playing a violent video game compared to playing a non-violent video game) affected the visual attention for weapons. We found that the basic visual bias for weapons compared to non-weapons was replicated, as was the sex difference in the strength of this bias. We also observed that the context produced by playing a violent video game prior to the visual search task, produced some sex differences in responding that were not present after playing the nonviolent video game, providing modest evidence that men may be more prone to cognitive behavioural effects of violent video game play. Interestingly, there was some evidence that both sexes de-prioritised non-weapons during search after playing the violent, relative to the non-violent, video game. We recommend that future studies investigate the task dynamics that may have led to this effect.
AB - Attentional biases for threatening stimuli of various kinds have been repeatedly demonstrated. More recently, sex differences in the strength of visual biases for weapons have been observed, with men exhibiting stronger biases than do women. In the current study we further explored this sex difference, by examining how immediate vicarious experience with weapons (via playing a violent video game compared to playing a non-violent video game) affected the visual attention for weapons. We found that the basic visual bias for weapons compared to non-weapons was replicated, as was the sex difference in the strength of this bias. We also observed that the context produced by playing a violent video game prior to the visual search task, produced some sex differences in responding that were not present after playing the nonviolent video game, providing modest evidence that men may be more prone to cognitive behavioural effects of violent video game play. Interestingly, there was some evidence that both sexes de-prioritised non-weapons during search after playing the violent, relative to the non-violent, video game. We recommend that future studies investigate the task dynamics that may have led to this effect.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0279360
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0279360
M3 - Article
C2 - 36548291
AN - SCOPUS:85144513491
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 17
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
IS - 12 December
M1 - e0279360
ER -