Anger Management Middle School Style
Posted by anastasia on 07-10-2007
There’s a game at the Sony Metreon arcade in San Francisco I used to play where you were basically a huge dinosaur having to fight other dinosaurs and eat plants and prehistoric people to survive. You wacked stuff with your giant tail and literally chomped on Cro-Magnons, blood spurting everywhere. While I’m not really a gamer, I found something incredibly satisfying about this game — it was a great tension reliever. I found these interesting stats from researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Mental Health and Media about middle schoolers and violent video games. From the UPI story:
Almost all young U.S. teens play video games — only 6 percent of the sample had not played any electronic games in the previous six months…
And it seems that both boys and girls like playing violent video games as a way to deal with their anger:
They found that most 7th and 8th graders — ages 12 to 14 — regularly play violent video games.
The researchers also found one-third of boys and 10 percent of girls play video or computer games almost every day.
Many children are playing video games to manage their feelings, including anger and stress, and children who play violent games are more likely to play to get their anger out, according to lead author Cheryl K. Olson.
Categorized under: Gaming