Your brain on video games: updated review on positive and negative effects

This topic has been the subject of many controversial but fruitful debates among neurophysiologists, neurobiologists, psychiatrists, other medical experts, the layperson and video gamers of course. A recent review in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience published on-line for the issue of December of this year gathered the opinion of six experts in the field of video game addiction and its consequences on brain physiology and behavior. The review highlights the positive and negative consequences of video game playing and provides an in-depth perspective on the future of video gaming and how the positive effects of video games can be used to exploit video gaming for use in rehabilitation, educational settings and for enhancing certain cognitive skills while suppressing the negative effects of video gaming. For example, certain video games can improve memory such as those that involve trivia or using mnemonics (Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, Jeopardy, and the Oregon Trail)

The panel of six experts was asked four questions for which they needed to elaborate. Only those comments and opinions for which there is common ground will be shown in this article while the most relevant differences among the experts will also be highlighted.



C1. Does playing video games have beneficial effects on brain behavior?

There is a need to redefine the meaning of "video game". Just as cancer is a multitude of diseases categorized as such, there are hundreds of different types of video games of many genres. It is interesting to know that the media has categorized video games with a broad brush and there is usually a negative association when one thinks about video games, especially violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto. In terms on the beneficial effects of video game playing, there is some evidence that shows that "certain" type of video games, especially the ones that involve fast pace first-person shooters, improve peripheral vision, enhances attention, task switching, object tracking, decision making, eye-hand coordination, reaction time, enhancements in low-level vision, visual spatial capacity, among others. There is also some evidence of improvement in certain cognitive skills seen in video gamers compared to non-video gamers showing interesting enhanced basal cognitive effects. One particular expert noted that time spent playing is an important factor that should be involved in this equation. He specifically pointed out that brief periods of playing time is usually associated with a positive trend in enhanced cognitive and motor abilities for certain types of games while a negative association is seen when players spend more than four hours a day. In other words, time spent playing excessively will impair social and academic abilities in teenagers and young adults.

Another expert mentioned that many of the beneficial effects depends on the genre of the video game. Specifically, pro-social and role-playing video games that contain "chatting" or other social networking functions (ie., Tribes or Halo) that promote collaboration and multiple players tend to enhance social and leadership skills.

Does playing video games have negative effects on brain behavior?

This is a very controversial question that has not been clearly answered to date. Clearly, all the panel of experts agreed that excessive video game playing is co-morbid with other psychiatric disorders such as chronic depression, ADHD, autism-like behaviors, bipolar disorders, Internet addiction and anxiety spectrum disorders. Violent video games that involve the shooting and destruction of other human beings, animals and objects tend to produce anxiety behavior, and is associated with promoting confrontational and disruptive behaviors in affected individuals and increases “hostile attribution bias”. However, some experts cautioned to take the evidence with a grain of salt. They specifically commented that playing violent video games does not generate a "mass murderer" or directly promote violent and aggressive behavior but increases the likelihood and risk for developing such aggressive behavior. For instance, there have been reported incidents in which a thirteen year old killed his mother after repeatedly being told that he is “spending too much time playing video games”. Another incident involved a young adult father who killed his child who insisted for food while playing video games. Video games that tend to be more addictive are those that do not involve accomplishing a specific series of levels or goals but are simply role-playing tournament games.



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Research explains why children with autism have difficulty indentifying emotions

New research presented at the Society for Neuroscience this past Wednesday has provided a clear explanation of why children with bipolar disorder have difficulty identifying and identifying the correct emotions in facial expressions. In brief, children with autism, severe mood dysregulation or bipolar disorders have a hard time identifying facial expressions because the affected children spend less time looking at a someone's eye.

It has been known for many decades that children with bipolar disorders or severe mood dysregulation have deficits in labeling facial expressions. For instance, an affected child may recognize your face and facial expressions only with a particular set of clothing accessories such as a particular hat, scarf or other head gear. On the hand, that same affected child may not recognize you if you wear a different hat or scarf the following day.

This phenomenon has intrigued and puzzled psychiatrists for many years. However, the research presented at the Society for Neuroscience on Wednesday November 16 at Washington D.C., by Pilyoung Kim from the National Institute of Mental Health, claimed that children with bipolar disorder tended to spend more time looking at the nose and mouth regions of faces as opposed to the eyes compared to a healthy control group. Interestingly, severe mood dysregulation disorder children had the least accuracy in tagging the correct emotions to a set of photographs compared to normal children and bipolar children while bipolar children fared the worse.

The methodology behind these studies involved the use of a sophisticated eye tracker that was mounted as a headset onto the heads of children. Eye movements were measured with an EyeLink II head-mounted eye tracker. Participants saw photographs of people showing four emotions (anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral) and were asked to label the emotion for each face.

"In combination with other studies , our findings indicate the potential value of treatment programs that teach children how to identify emotions by looking at others 'eyes', said Kim " If such training helps children to process the emotional information in the world more accurately, that may in turn increase their ability to regulate their emotional reactions to social situations".