Violent Video Games and Aggression: Stimulation or Catharsis or Both?

Effects of violent video games on aggression remain contentious despite decades of empirical investigations. Using eight-wave panel data collected from 662 South Korean adolescents (grades 4, 7, and 10) for a 4-year period (number of observations = 5,296), the current research critically tested competing hypotheses concerning the relations between violent video games and aggression. In so doing, we directly compared the results from dynamic fixed-effects (FE) regression with those from conventional contemporaneous FE regression to observe if different statistical models yield different outcomes. Consistent with the catharsis hypothesis, the dynamic FE model showed that violent (vs. nonviolent) game playing significantly