Hello @GaryLeeWagener and welcome at Rocket Beans Forum / (also in the name of Lars Pascal Will).
I found the abstracts of the psychological studies at your profile at researchgate honestly quite interesting, e.g. The studies concerning possible stereotype effects in gaming.
Did you or people in your team also work on similar (newer) studies about this topic?
And is this online inquiry also part of an ongoing study?
Would just be interesting to know, as many folks here are interested in topics like gaming, psychology or (gender)politics etc.
thank you
thank you for your interest! I really need to update my reseachgate and my orcid though
Yes, actually we expanded on this concept of stereotypes in the video game context and recruited more participants for the experiments. We are going to present the results at the ISRA conference 2022 in Ottawa in July and the full paper of the project is currently under review in a scientific journal. However, as our research interests have somewhat shifted, this project is for the moment disconitnued (until I can find a bachelor student to supervise who would be willing to do his/her bachelor´s thesis on that topic).
I am currently doing my PhD at the University of Luxembourg and the subject of my dissertation revolves more around why people play video games and if playing video games can have positive effects on mental health and well-being, mainly focussing on stress markers. This means that I am mainly investigating if playing video games can reduce stress in people and I am comparing also non-violent with violent video game effects. This comparision between non-violent and violent video games comes from results of an experiment that I conducted for my master´s thesis (full paper also currently udner review) in which I investigated effects of violent video games on aggression markers (yes, the age-old violent video games make people violent debate). However, there were no effects of violent video games on any aggression markers (no heightened aggression hormones and no heightened aggression). On the contrary, physiological markers for stress (the hormone cortisol) was lower for people who played a violent video game. We attributed this to a possible relaxing effect of violent video games, a catharsis-like effect. Currently, I am investigating this further.
Also, we plan to investigate the effects of meaningful video games (like the game Gris) on mental health and depression. This means that we will test if playing a meaningful video game can actually make you feel better. This is because there have been studies that proved the effectiveness of certain casual video games to improve depressive symptoms in people; even sometimes yielding better effects than medication.
This is for now the scope of my current research projects
/ (also in the name of Lars Pascal Will).