Video Gaming and Children's Psychosocial Wellbeing: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

The effects of video games on children's psychosocial development remain the focus of debate. At two timepoints, 1 year apart, 194 children (7.27-11.43 years old; male = 98) reported their gaming frequency, and their tendencies to play violent video games, and to game (a) cooperatively and (b) competitively; likewise, parents reported their children's psychosocial health. Gaming at time one was associated with increases in emotion problems. Violent gaming was not associated with psychosocial changes. Cooperative gaming was not associated with changes in prosocial behavior. Finally, competitive gaming was associated with decreases in prosocial behavior, but only among children who played video games with high frequency. Thus, gaming frequency was related to increases in internalizing but not externalizing, attention, or peer problems, violent gaming was not associated with increases in externalizing problems, and for children playing approximately 8 h or more per week, frequent competitive gaming may be a risk factor for decreasing prosocial behavior. We argue that replication is needed and that future research should better distinguish between different forms of gaming for more nuanced and generalizable insight.

Keywords: Longitudinal; Prosocial behavior; Psychosocial development; Video games.

Fig. 1

Cross-lagged panel model testing the bidirectional associations between gaming frequency and psycho-social health. SDQ Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, Gaming gaming frequency in hours reported by children. Highlighted path reflects hypothesized path. Not depicted: Gender, child’s age, and parental level of education were included as control variables; correlations among predictor and among outcomes are included in the model

Fig. 2

Model testing the associations between gaming frequency, violent gaming, and psychosocial health. SDQ Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, Gaming gaming frequency in hours reported by children. Highlighted path reflects hypothesized path. Not depicted: Gender, child’s age, and parental level of education were included as control variables; correlations among predictor and among outcomes are included in the model. This model was run twice, each using a different SDQ subscale, once with the conduct problems subscale and once with the prosocial behavior subscale

Fig. 3

Model testing the associations between cooperative and competitive gaming and changes in prosocial behavior. Gaming Gaming frequency in hours reported by children, Coop Cooperative gaming (mean-centered), Comp competitive gaming (mean-centered), Freq Frequency. Not depicted: Gender, child’s age, parental level of education, and violent video gaming were included as control variables

Fig. 4

Interaction between competitive gaming and gaming frequency predicting changes in prosocial behavior. Values to the right of the vertical line represent cases where prosocial behavior differs across groups, and the vertical line marks children who reported playing 8.64 h per week. On the x-axis, −0.5 represents children who reported playing 2.87 h per week, 0 represents children who reported playing the mean number of hours per week (4.9)