Thaindian News

Apr 16 (THAINDIAN NEWS) In an article which was posted by Rueters in 2007, we were told that “excessive” PC game time impairs sleep memory. In the article they told how adolescent boys who “relax” in the evenings after doing homework will not sleep well, and have problems remembering what they learned. Now, a new sleep study is showing that that may not be the case. BBC NEWS is reporting that the findings suggest that it does not take anymore than 3 minutes longer for a child to fall asleep after playing video games.

In the first reports which were posted by Rueters, eleven healthy 12 to 14 year old boys who had no former sleep problems and were on no medications were watched. They played age appropriate computer games, or watched exciting movies 2 to 3 hours before bed. The results were said t show that the boys took longer to fall asleep, spent less time in “slow wave” sleep, and more time in stage 2 non REM sleep. The games were said to cause the kids to have “higher arousal state of the central nervous system,” and therefore not be able to sleep.

In the new study, U.S Researcher, Craig Anderson, who is a professor of psychology at Iowa State University, states that his review was conducted by 8 researchers from the US and Japan. They did 130 studies of 130,000 kids worldwide. The results were astounding. The games did not cause the kids to sleep less. What was discovered, however, is that playing extremely violent video games produced more aggressive, less caring kids. This is really no surprise.

“We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method - that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal - and regardless of the cultures tested in this study - East and West - you get the same effects,” Anderson says in a statement. “And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts. Such exposure also increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect and decreases pro-social behavior.”

The study was published in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. But with all of that said, it does not keep kids from sleeping if they play games before bed. Parents should just be sure those games are not aggressively violent in nature.