Violence and the media

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Violence and the media
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Correlational evidence

• Belson (1978), surveyed the behavior and viewing
  habits of over 1,500 adolescent males in London
  in the early 1970s.
• High exposure to television violence and violent
  behavior were moderately correlated.
• The more exposure to television violence, the
  greater the reported actual violent activity of
  the respondents holding constant the impact of
  other influences on violent behavior such as
  family background, cognitive ability, etc.

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Longitudinal studies

• Lefkowitz, Huesmann, Eron, and their associates
  studied the television viewing habits and
  behavior of 875 third-grade children in a
  semirural county in upstate New York during the
  1960s. The researchers reported that children
  with a preference for violent programs at age
  eight were more likely to exhibit aggressive
  behavior at age 19 and engage in serious crimes
  by the time they were 30 years old.

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• In a similar analysis based on surveys conducted
  in five countries in the late 1970s, Huesmann
  and Eron (1986) concluded that their findings
  suggest a bidirectional relationship between
  exposure to media violence and violent behavior
  the child learns to be violent from violent media
  which, in turn, induce the desire to watch more
  violent media.

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• Milavsky and associates (1982), followed several
  hundred children in two Midwestern cities for
  three years in the 1970's.
• Initial correlations between exposure to violent
  media at the beginning of the period and later
  aggressiveness turned small and statistically
  nonsignificant after controlling for social and
  familial factors, as well as past levels of
  aggressive behavior.

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• Johnson and his colleagues have been following
  707 families in upstate New York since 1975. They
  used statistics to separate TV viewing from other
  factors contributing to aggressive behaviour,
  such as family income, education and prior
  history of violence.

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• The biggest jump in aggressive behaviour occurred
  between adolescents who watched less than one
  hour of TV per day and those who watched 1-3
  hours, all other things being equal, the
  researchers found.
• Children who watched three or more hours of TV
  per day between the ages of 14 and 16 were
  roughly five times more likely to commit violent
  acts as adults than those who watched less than
  one hour.

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• Critics question the way that Johnson's team
  divided people by their viewing habits
  invalidates their results.
• Only 88 adolescents averaged less than one hour
  in front of the box each day. This group is "so
  small, it's aberrant", says Guy Cumberbatch, who
  heads the Communications Research Group, a UK
  company that does broadcasting and social-policy
  research. Its members will probably have many
  other characteristics not reported in this study,
  such as being teachers' offspring or devoutly
  religious.
• Johnson counters that dividing TV viewers into
  the groups that Cumberbatch suggests would not
  have affected the study's basic results.

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Field experiment

• Robinson Well I was mostly interested in the
  aggression thats common among these same kids,
  the 8 to 9 year old children, which is the
  hitting and kicking and rough-housing on the
  playground, or verbal teasing and cursing other
  children.
• The research team developed a curriculum that
  emphasized turning off the television and
  engaging in other activities. They ran a field
  experiment where the curriculum was provided to
  some classes and others did not receive it.

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Measures

• Peer rating of aggressionkids rated everyone
  else in the class on how likely individuals were
  to say talk back to the teacher, or hit another
  child without a reason. The researchers asked
  positive things as well, like share their toys
  with each other, so it wasnt just all negative.
• Observation of 60 of the kids on the playground
• coded each of their acts over one minute
  randomly selected periods, multiple one-minute
  periods, so we actually had a measure, a direct
  measure of how aggressive they were, physically
  aggressive and verbally aggressive, we listened
  to them and watched them.

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• And finally we also surveyed their parents in
  terms of their parent judgements of the kids
  aggression.
• What we found . . . was that the kids who were in
  the school that received the curriculum actually
  reduced their ratings according to their peers .
  . .by about 25 compared to the kids in the
  comparison school. In terms of playground
  aggression, the kids in the school that received
  the curriculum performed about 40 fewer
  physically aggressive acts per minute, and
  performed about 50 fewer verbally aggressive
  acts per minute.

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Natural experiments

• A study analyzed effects on children from the
  introduction of television in a rural Canadian
  community during the 1950s. The researchers . .
  . compared children before and after the
  introduction of television in one town (Notel)
  with their peers in two comparable towns where
  television was already well established Unitel
  (receiving the government-owned channel, CBC) and
  Multitel (receiving both CBC and U.S. stations).

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• Aggression was measured by observations of
  childrens interactions in the schoolyard during
  free play, by teacher ratings, and by peer
  ratings. Longitudinal observations of 45 children
  first observed in grades one and two and
  re-evaluated two years later indicated that both
  verbal and physical aggression increased over
  this two-year period for children in Notel after
  the introduction of television, but not for
  children in the two control communities where
  television was already available.

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• Ledingham et al. (1993) note that Unitel received
  only the public television channel (CBC), yet its
  children exhibited aggression levels similar to
  the Multitel community, which received U.S.
  channels (and their greater level of media
  violence) as well.

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• Also, The amount of television watched at the
  initial time of testing by the children of Unitel
  and Multitel did not significantly predict the
  amount of aggression seen two years later
  (although aggression assessed in the follow up
  period was predicted by television viewing
  assessed at the same time).

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• The link between television and violent behaviour
  is still far from clear, believes Helena Hird,
  spokesperson for the Independent Television
  Commission that regulates commercial television
  in Britain. "There's plenty of research that
  shows quite the contrary," she says.
• For example the Atlantic island of St. Helena
  only got television a few years ago. Children
  there have not become more aggressive, possibly
  because they live in close-knit, carefully
  supervised communities.

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Many sponsored projects and reviews of literature

• National Commission on the Causes and Prevention
  of Violence (1969)
• The Surgeon Generals Scientific Advisory
  Committee on Television and Social Behavior
  (1972)
• The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
  Television and Behavior Project (1982)
• The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry Child
  and Television Drama Review (1982)
• The American Psychological Association Task Force
  on Television and Society (1992)

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• All five reviews note the existence of a
  significant empirical association between
  exposure to television violence and aggressive
  behavior among youthful viewers.

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• The NIMH study, for example, noted that the
  consensus among most of the research community is
  that violence on television does lead to
  aggressive behavior by children and teenagers who
  watch the programs. The APA task force
  concluded There is clear evidence that
  television violence can cause aggressive behavior
  and can cultivate values favoring the use of
  aggression to resolve conflicts.

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• Exposure to mediated violent depictions likely
  explains a relatively small amount of the total
  variation in youthful violent behavior.
• As Huesmann et al. (1997) point out What is
  important for the investigation of the role of
  media violence is that no one should expect the
  learning of aggression from exposure to media
  violence to explain more than a small percentage
  of the individual variation in aggressive
  behavior.

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• Researchers have become more sensitive to the
  impact of variations in depictions of violence
  and differences in response among audience
  members.
• NTVS study of content
• Peer influence, family role models, social and
  economic status, educational level and the
  availability of weapons can each significantly
  alter the likelihood of a particular reaction to
  viewing violence on television.

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• According to the American Psychological
  Association's 1993 report, "Violence and Youth
  Psychology's Response," we know that there are
  not just one but four long-term effects of
  viewing violence
• Increased aggressiveness and anti-social behavior
  
• Increased fear of being or becoming a victim
• Increased desensitization to violence and victims
  of violence
• Increased appetite for more and more violence in
  entertainment and real life

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Other media and violence

• Popular music with violent lyrics may lead to
  increased aggression related thoughts and
  emotions and this effect is directly related to
  the violence in the lyrics, according to a recent
  study appearing in the Journal of Personality and
  Social Psychology. In a set of experiments
  involving over 500 college students, researchers
  from Iowa State University and the Texas
  Department of Human Services examined the effects
  of violent and nonviolent songs. The students
  listened to the songs and their aggressive
  thoughts and feelings were then measured.

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• Results indicated that after listening to violent
  songs students assigned more aggressive meanings
  to ambiguous words (words that such as "rock" and
  "stick" that can have either aggressive or
  nonaggressive connotations). As well, the
  research concluded that listening to violent
  songs led to increased feelings of hostility.

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Video games

• The greatest concern is directed toward the
  violence found in video games

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Video game features of concern

• Audience involvement
• First-person shooters
• Reward for simulated violent behavior
• Increasing levels of difficulty as a result of
  success (ideal learning conditions)
• Group play/support
• Social support
• Immediate feedback (interactivity)
• Few inhibitors

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Video game features

• Good guy violence
• Realism (increasing over time)
• Immersion
• Compelling experience
• Fascist/militarist ideology

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• For those same 50 years, the circle of blame has
  been fueled by one unanswerable question "Does
  watching violence cause someone to become
  violent?" The reason we've made such poor
  progress on this issue for 50 years is because
  this is the wrong question to ask about violence
  in the media. This question trivializes a complex
  issue.

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• The real question should be "What is the
  long-term impact on our national psyche when
  millions of children, in their formative years,
  grow up decade after decade bombarded with very
  powerful visual and verbal messages demonstrating
  violence as the preferred way to solve problems,
  and normalizing fear and violence as 'the way
  things are?'"