-eye coordination as it relates to personality. Ballard and Weist (1996) took 30 male undergraduates from Appalachian State University. The guys were split into two groups. Group one played Corner Pocket (a billiards game with virtually no action) while group two played Mortal Kombat (an extremely popular fighting game), which was set at either high violence mode or low violence mode. The subjects played for 10 minutes before filling out a hostility questionnaire. Sherry (2000) drank hundreds of cups of coffee and alienated his wife and kids while pouring over insane amounts of research. There were 32 studies available to him, 7 of which he had to throw out for various reasons. Of the remaining 25 he carefully looked for validity problems while synthesizing them into the definitive meta-analysis on this topic.As with all things capitalist and otherwise, it’s all about the bottom line, let’s see what they found. Cooper and Mackie (1986) found that, overall, the kids played with the skilled toy and quiet toy (118 sec. and 134 sec. respectively) more than the active toy or aggressive toy (89 sec. and 59 sec.). After exposure to the aggressive game the kids played with the aggressive toy more than the kids in the other two conditions combined (82 sec. compared to 46 sec. for the other two groups). Amount of time pressing the reward/punishment buzzers was not correlated with the game played. Tamborini et all (2000) found a significant effect for media environment on hostile thoughts, F (3,91)=7.21, p*.01, eta=.20. Contrary to expectations, a higher number of hostil thoughts was found among those who played the game on a PC, not those who played Virtual Reality. They did find that those playing violent games had higher hostility ratings than those whom played nonviolent games, but the highest hostility was found among those who observed the violent games. Derek (1995) used a one-way ANOVA test and found no significan...
