Culture plays a part in the construction of legal understandings in the Supreme Court contrary to much legal scholarship. The oral argument of the Supreme Court is a unique way for Justices to gather information beyond the formalized briefs and prior written opinions. In the oral argument the Supreme Court Justices utilize cultural codes as tools to probe, shape, negotiate and challenge the legal meanings and boundaries of the case before them. Using the oral argument transcript in a 2010 Supreme Court case on the issue of whether California has the right to censor the sale of violent video games to minors, this study attempts to understand the sociological processes behind constructing law. Findings show cultural codes being used by the Justices, in this legal context of an oral argument, to address the border disputes and help to establish the specific legal parameters of a case.

The purpose of the study was to examine whether a potential juror would give harsher sentences to defendants based only on the manipulation of the defendant's personal hobby. This was investigated by manipulating the hobby through a hypothetical manslaughter scenario in a vignette. Participants were asked to answer questions pertaining to the defendant's guilt and potential sentencing. Results indicate that participants' sex, participants' authoritarianism, and defendant's hobby were significant factors. Significant interactions were found pertaining to whether the defendant should receive counseling across sex by violence and sex by avocation. These results are evidence that the use of jurors in the legal system is flawed and needs to be improved upon. Future research should examine an age distribution closer to the national mean, and the online setting should be replaced with an in person mock jury that will have more realistic group dynamic and higher ecological validity.

Mankind has developed a lot in the field of Information Technology (IT), Computer Science and Media entertainment. Video games are also the most popular form of media entertainment and gaming environment. It has been popular long before the new generation video games idea was ever thought by the video game designers. Through our research we tried to investigate the positive and negative effects of video games on youth and children. This form of entertainment is more designed attracted among the people, due to the high sophisticated music and environment, which catches every eye. We not only analyzed the previous attempts in this area, but also tried to add some contribution to it. The excessive use of video games makes it more damaging effects on a young mind. Parents and teachers should keep a check on youngsters, and also the companies who design such violent games should keep in account that, what they show through these video games must have some logical or educational value. Many children and youngsters we found through our survey like to play video games because they do not have any other entertaining options. Violent video games are the most appreciated one among children and young people because of the detailed high quality graphics, more realistic images, use of artificial intelligence, complex game strategies, intelligent game inference engines and human-machine interaction. Parents should keep check on their children and select such video games for them which teach their children some useful things and beneficial for them in studies and near future. The teachers in school should also talk more about the advantages of educative games or physical games to develop the young minds more professional and realistic, rather than creating fantasy and fake imaginations. Our survey and research showed us that due to the high attraction of the video games, positive and negative effects are going side by side. Many youth and children do not take the video games seriously and just play them as any another game, while some video game players have disturbed their studies and health by playing the video games for many hours. Many children and young generation denied calling it as an addiction or bad habit. If violence and killing a life is entertainment then human beings will consider it, as a fun and modern society cannot be defined as civilized. This is what we found from our research and survey. / Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik

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Att spela datorspel är för många barn en rolig och populär sysselsättning och det finns olika sorters spel som barnen spelar. Många barn spelar våldsamma datorspel vilket har uppmärksammats i skolor. De har observerat att barn som spelat våldsamma datorspel lekt på ett aggressivt och våldsamt sätt på skolgården. Inom forskningen har också sambandet mellan våldsamma datorspel och barn observerats och det har genomförts mycket forskning inom området för att utröna om barn som spelar våldsamma datorspel blir mer aggressiva och våldsamma av att spela dessa spel. Forskningen på området är däremot motstridig huruvida barn som spelar våldsamma datorspel blir mer aggressiva och våldsamma. Studiens syfte är att undersöka vad det finns för stöd i forskning som talar för eller emot att barn som spelar våldsamma datorspel blir aggressiva och våldsamma och varför forskningen är motstridig på området. Resultatet i studien är att när endast sambandet våldsamma datorspel och aggressivitet mäts tenderar sambandet att vara starkare, att barn som spelar våldsamma datorspel också uppvisar högre nivåer av aggression. Det som talar emot att barn som spelar våldsamma datorspel uppvisar högre aggressionsnivåer är att när andra bakgrundsvariabler beaktas tenderar sambandet mellan våldsamma datorspel och aggressionsnivåer hos barn att minska eller försvinna. Hur aggressionsbegreppet tolkas och att vissa forskare bedriver en forskning som visar ett samband med att barn blir mer våldsamma utav att spela våldsamma datorspel och forskare som visar på motsatsen är anledningar till att forskningen är motstridig på området. / Playing computergames is to many children a fun and popular hobby and there are various kinds of games that children play. Many children play violent computergames which has attracted attention in schools. They have observed that children who played violent computergames played in an aggressive and violent manner in the schoolyard. Within science the connection between violent computergames and children has been observed and there has been much research in the field to find out if children who plays violent computergames becomes more aggressive and violent when they play these games. Research on the other hand is contradictory whether children who play violent computergames becomes more aggressive and violent. Purpose of the study is to investigate what are the support for in research who speaks for or against that children who plays violent computergames becomes aggressive and violent and why research is contradictory in this area. The result in the study is when only the connection between violent computergames and aggressiveness is measured the connection seems to be stronger that children who plays violent computergames also exhibit higher levels of aggression. What speaks against that children who plays violent computergames exhibit higher aggression levels is that when other background variables is considered the connection between violent computergames and aggression seems to decrease or disappear. How the term aggression is interpreted and that some scientist conducts research that shows a relation that children who plays violent computergames becomes more aggressive when playing these games and other scientists conducts research that shows the opposite are reasons that research are contradictionary in the area.

A recent meta-analysis of Anderson and colleagues (2010) shows that violent behavior in computer games promotes violent behavior in real-life and inhibits prosocial behavior. A couple of studies conducted by Greitemeyer and Osswald (2010) lead to the conclusion that helping behavior in computer games furthers helping behavior in real-life. There exist no studies examining the combined effect of violence and helping in computer games, although this combination is typical for violent video games (Anderson et al., 2010). In violent RPGs, a lot of tasks consist of helping someone by using violence. The present study addresses this issue and bridges the current empirical gap by investigating if violent emergency assistance furthers helping behavior and/or violent behavior in real-life. To accomplish that, the role-playing game “Oblivion” was modified to create four different experimental conditions: (1) violent emergency assistance, (2) killing, (3) helping, and (4) treasure hunting. Comparing these conditions, violent emergency assistance seemingly reduces helping behavior in real-life and at the same time furthers violent behavior. The results are in unison with the moral management model (Hartmann & Vorderer, 2010; Hartmann, in press), which is based on Banduras Theory of Moral Disengagement (Bandura, 2002).