The dark and bright side of video game consumption: Effects of violent and prosocial video games

Sadism and Personality Disorders

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

Sadistic pleasure-the enjoyment of harm-infliction to others-can have devastating interpersonal and societal consequences. The goal of the current review is to illuminate the nomological net of traits related to sadism. We aim to achieve an understanding of the current empirical status on the link between sadism and personality disorders, psychopathy, the Dark Triad, and basic personality traits in clinical and community-based samples.

RECENT FINDINGS

The field is dominated by self-report studies on the Dark Triad with convenience samples. The link with DSM personality disorders has hardly been empirically studied. Existing evidence shows that sadism is most strongly related to increased psychopathic personality traits. Sadism can originate both from the interpersonal, affective, and behavioural basis of dark personality traits. There are diverging ideas on the differential status between sadism, psychopathy, and other dark traits. Research is needed on the causal impact of the broader range of personality disorders on sadism, in more diverse samples, including behavioural assessments of sadistic pleasure, as well as on the interplay of such personality traits with situational and affective aspects, and victim attitudes.

The light, the dark, and everything else: making sense of young people's digital gaming

Whether gaming has a beneficial or detrimental effect on young people's lives is a defining feature in both the research and the public discussion of youth digital gaming. In this qualitative study, we draw from a thematic analysis of the experiences of 180 game players in Finland, aged 15-25 years. Utilizing the digital gaming relationship (DGR) theory, we explore how different aspects of gaming actualize in their lives, and how different features of gaming culture participation come together to form their experience. We contend that framing gaming as a balancing act between beneficial and detrimental obscures much of the complexity of young people's gaming, reinforces a partially false dichotomy, and overlooks young people's agency. Based on our results, we suggest alternative approaches that help reduce and avoid these problems.