Okay. A) short-term effect means it didn’t last very long. Quick effect means it happened fast.
The new survey showed that the participants, as a whole, viewed their bodies more negatively.
He’s studying idiots, then, or people with already media-conditioned faulty self-images. Ohhh right, it says he’s using students. Why not test a large segment of the populace, instead of just-out-of-high-school-hell students whom we know have terrible body images even when they’re smokin hot.
Personally I’ve never looked at a video game character and felt I didn’t measure up. I have, however, wondered why I was making my character work out to buff up in GTA: San Andreas and not just working out on my own and killing fools in the video game (thankfully it was easy enough to ‘cheat’ your way to uber buff in that game). Maybe I’m an exception to the rule because I enjoy working out on my own, but this study does seem to contradict the finding that video game players generally enjoy a better physique than their TV watching counterparts and likely have a better self-image.
Also, check this out:
According to research by a Kansas State University Psychology professor, gamers that view extremely muscular men or very thin women are more likely to feel self-conscious about their own physique.
He then goes on to call these characters ‘attractive’ – but you can find a large segment of our populace that would not agree with his characterization.
The professor was quick to point out that their might be other factors contributing to the lowered body image.
“I’m not saying that everyone with major body-image issues has them because of video games,” Harris said. “There may be other issues of concern with video games besides the well-known concern about violence.”
I really don’t think this guy knows what he’s talking about. What other factors were there in this study besides the video games and the surveys themselves? I mean, what did the follow up questions look like, “Do you feel uglier now that you’ve seen all those impossibly beautiful people on the screen, fatty?” And seriously, the bit about “I’m not saying that everyone with major body-image issues has them because of video games,” sounds like he thinks that no one realizes there was a world before 1980 (or realizes that it wasn’t until the past ten years or so that video game characters started looking even mildly attractive by anyone’s standards. Seriouly, no one wanted to fuck Princess Peach or Samus until they showed up modeled to hotness in Super Smash Bros. Well, okay, maybe RStevens wanted to bone a 32×32 pixel sprite back in the day but he’s more an exception to every rule.) or that people had body image issues before video games appeared.
Bottom line: this is a terribly tiny and not very well performed study that doesn’t tell us anything than what we didn’t already know: students looking at people more attractive than them feel they don’t measure up because they’ve been conditioned that way by our advertising-addled culture, even if the people aren’t real, and the younger you are the more susceptible you are to media-pushed influences.
Also, ask any anorexic how they look and they’ll tell you they’re fat. Even when every bone is showing and they’re hair-falling-out-skinny. Self-image is so utterly internal that a study like this is practically useless without full psych evaluations on every participant, and even then that science is still at the ‘bang two rocks together’ stage in it’s evolution.