A study conducted by two Iowa State professors has caught the eye of the television news magazine “Dateline NBC” and might lead to a $600,000 five-year study of violent video games at ISU.

“Dateline” will be coming to campus August 2-4 to do a piece on the work of Craig Anderson, chairman of the psychology department, and Brad Bushman, associate professor of psychology.

During the filming of the show, the two researchers want viewers to see the results of their study dealing with the correlation between violent video games and increased levels of aggression.

“People should know that violent video games are a factor that increase violence in society,” Bushman said.

“Dateline” will be at ISU just to film a few of the participants in the study, Anderson said.

However, if the grant proposal submitted by Anderson and Bushman to the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health is accepted, the two will initiate a series of further experiments over the next five years to test the hypothesis that exposure to violent video games at an early age may encourage kids to become violent in adulthood.

“People who are affected by violent media as kids become violent adults. That violence doesn’t just go away,” Anderson said.

One reason Anderson and Bushman believe violent video games raise levels of aggression is that “you get rewarded often for behaving aggressively, and you adopt the role of the aggressor by pulling the trigger of a gun or other weapons,” Bushman said.

Anderson said this kind of a response results from playing “first-person games [where] as the player, your eyes are the eyes of the character, [and from] playing first-person shooter games, which would be any game that involves shooting or blowing up things.”

Anderson, a new faculty member at ISU this fall, has been researching the effects of violent video games on college-age students for the past five years at the University of Missouri.

One of the effects of the games on the college-age players was that “playing a violent video game increases aggressive thoughts and aggressive short-term behavior,” he said.

However, Anderson emphasized there is not yet enough research into the correlation between violent behavior and violent video games to conclude playing violent video games in childhood leads to long-term behavioral problems.

By doing further research into this area of study, Anderson and Bushman both said they hope people will realize that violent video games do influence behavior.

From watching the “Dateline” piece, Anderson said he wants parents to think twice about how they allow their children to make use of the computer.

“My hope is that parents will do a better job of monitoring and controlling what their kids are doing. If you are pouring garbage into your kids’ minds, it shouldn’t be too hard to believe that that’s what will also be coming out of your kid’s head,” Anderson said.