Our results corroborate recent studies that found that the belief of consuming alcohol does not increase anger recognition or aggressive behavior but decreases aggression and social stress.

The present study investigated the influence on Internet addiction of numerous variables ranging from personality to psychological and physical well-being, in a large and highly ecologically valid sample of mainly male adolescent online computer gamers (first-person-shooter video gamers) in Germany. Low Self-Directedness could be linked to a high Internet Addiction Test score in the present study, and the data yielded a continuum model indicating that low Self-Directedness is highly correlated with Internet Addiction Score, not only in students but also in first-person-shooter video gamers.

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Findings from twin studies yield heritability estimates of 0.50 for prosocial behaviours like empathy, cooperativeness and altruism. First molecular genetic studies underline the influence of polymorphisms located on genes coding for the receptors of the neuropeptides, oxytocin and vasopressin. However, the proportion of variance explained by these gene loci is rather low indicating that additional genetic variants must be involved. Pharmacological studies show that the dopaminergic system interacts with oxytocin and vasopressin. The present experimental study tests a dopaminergic candidate polymorphism for altruistic behaviour, the functional COMT Val158Met SNP. N = 101 healthy Caucasian subjects participated in the study. Altruism was assessed by the amount of money donated to a poor child in a developing country, after having earned money by participating in two straining computer experiments. Construct validity of the experimental data was given: the highest correlation between the amount of donations and personality was observed for cooperativeness (r = 0.32, P ≤ 0.001). Carriers of at least one Val allele donated about twice as much money as compared with those participants without a Val allele (P = 0.01). Cooperativeness and the Val allele of COMT additively explained 14.6% of the variance in donation behaviour. Results indicate that the Val allele representing strong catabolism of dopamine is related to altruism.