Jun 28, 2014 12:23 PM EDT By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

"Bad" video game behavior may increase players' moral sensitivity, according to a recent study.

Researchers at the University of Buffalo found that heinous behavior played out in a virtual environment can lead to players' increased sensitivity toward the moral codes they violated.

"Rather than leading players to become less moral, this research suggests that violent video-game play may actually lead to increased moral sensitivity," Matthew Grizzard, who led the study, said in a statement. "This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in voluntary behavior that benefits others."

For the study, researchers induced guilt in participants by having them play a video game where they violated two of five moral domains: care/harm, fairness/reciprocity, in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity.

The research team recruited 185 subjects and randomly assigned them to either a guilt-inducing condition - in which they played a shooter game as a terrorist or were asked to recall real-life acts that induced guilt -- or a control condition -- shooter game play as a UN soldier and the recollection of real-life acts that did not induce guilt.

After completing the video game or the memory recall, participants completed a three-item guilt scale and a 30-item moral foundations questionnaire designed to assess the importance to them of the five moral domains cited above.

After their analysis, researchers found significant positive correlations between video-game guilt and the moral foundations violated during game play.

"We found that after a subject played a violent video game, they felt guilt and that guilt was associated with greater sensitivity toward the two particular domains they violated -- those of care/harm and fairness/reciprocity," Grizzard said.

He said the findings suggest that emotional experiences evoked by media exposure can increase the intuitive foundations upon which human beings make moral judgments.

"This is particularly relevant for video-game play, where habitual engagement with that media is the norm for a small, but considerably important group of users," he added.

The findings were recently published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.

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