Media Violence and Children

Running Head: MEDIA VIOLENCE AND CHILDREN

Does Exposure to Media Violence Causes Real Aggression on Children?

Ruby Galvan
CJ 205 Juvenile Justice Systems
Paper 1
July 2011 Abstract
Children in the United States are exposed to a great deal of media violence. On average, 70% of prime-time television programs and 93% of children’s programs contain violence (Gerbner, Ross, Morgan & Signorielli, 1994). There is a strong consensus among researchers that viewing media violence causes real aggression on children. This research draws on empirical studies with different theories and methods. The purpose of this research is to determine if media violence causes real aggression on children. The results should indicate if there is a correlation between media violence and real aggression on children. Does Exposure to Media Violence Causes Real Aggression on Children?
The debate over media violence and its effects on children has been a controversy over the last decades. Nowadays many children spend a significant amount of time in front of television and much of its content is violent in nature. Many researchers have examined the relation between exposure to media violence and real aggression. “Long term effects with children are now generally believed to be primarily due to long-term observational learning cognitions supporting aggression whereas short-term effects with adults and children are recognized as also due to priming or imitation of specific behaviors” (Huesmann, 2003). Some researchers have demonstrated that very young children will imitate aggressive acts on television in their play time with friends. Before age four, children are unable distinguish between fact and fantasy and may view violence as an ordinary occurrence. Prime time programs averaged approximately five violent acts per hour, while programs aimed at children averaged 23 violent acts per hour between 1973-1995 (Gerbner, et al., 1994).
“From the time the sperm and egg unite, miraculous changes occur that culminate in the birth of an infant” (Martin & Fabes, 2009, p.89). Ever since a child is born their learning process start and they will need our orientation to help them survive in this world. People are in charge of their development. “Through modeling, individuals learn new behaviors, the contexts appropriate for those behaviors, and their consequences” (Martin & Fabes, 2009, p.38). Children often mimic the action of super heroes from movies and television that is why is important to guide our children since there are little and to learn how watching media violence can affect their future behavior. As it is stated in the text book, “…they hold that children will model their behavior according to the reactions they receive from others, either positive or negative; the behavior of those adults that are in close contact with, especially parents; and the behavior they view on television and in movies” (Siegel and Welsh, 2009). What the government is doing about this issue? As most people know television is viewed by most people as a teacher in every home because of that the government has implemented some legislation in order to make sure children are watching educational programs on television. “Between 1960 and 1970, Congress passed legislation funding the construction of public educational television stations and the development of educational programming. Today public television provides a wide range of educational programming, and almost every US family has access to these programs” (Martin & Fabes, 2009, p.294). There is another policy that protects children and is called The Children’s Television Act, this was approved by congress on 1990 and it has the purpose of increase the quantity of educational and informational broadcast television programming for children with the only purpose of further the positive development of children 16 years of age and under in any respect, including the child’s intellectual, cognitive or social, emotional needs. Federal Communications Commission, 1995). All these policies are with the only purpose to create programs that are designed to educate and inform children and to keep them away from the media violence that is shown on television. My hypothesis is that Media Violence does cause real aggression on children due to the fact that children are in some way negatively influenced. This research paper classifies research findings on the relationship between media violence and aggression. This research draws on empirical studies with different theories and methods. I consider empirical articles essential on this kind of research papers. The research findings are presented in the following areas: 1) longitudinal relations between children’s exposure to TV violence and their aggressive behavior; 2) Scientific facts versus media misinformation; 3) Comparative culture: JAPAN; 4) Mental models; 5) Lack of social imagination; 6) General aggression models and 7) Emotional effects of violent television news.
Longitudinal Effects
The first empirical proof I found interesting and that support my hypothesis is a research about how media violence is one of the factors that contributes to the development of aggression. In this article I found out the explanation of how exposure to violence in the mass media could cause both short and long term effects of violent behavior on children. This study examines the longitudinal relations between TV-violence viewing at early ages and adult aggressive behavior about 15 years later. This empirical study is a little different because it focuses on the longitudinal effects. “Long-term effects with children are now generally believed to be primarily due to long-term observational learning cognitions supporting aggression whereas short-term effects with adults and children are recognized as also due to priming or imitation of specific behaviors” (Huesmann, 2003). The theory on this study is that long-term relations have been ascribed mainly to acquisition through observational learning of three-social cognitive structures: schemas about hostile world, scripts of social problem solving that focuses on aggression, and normative beliefs that aggression is acceptable. The evidence is that children tend to imitate whomever they observe; these theories propose that very young children imitate almost any specific behavior they see. “Observation of specific aggressive behaviors around them increases children’s likelihood of behaving in exactly that way” (Huesmann, 2003). Parents blame media violence as a key factor to the high school massacres like the one in Columbine High School and so many others where people had been killed due to aggressive behavior. Parents have been concerned about violence on the television for the past decades and researchers like Huesmann have been studying television’s effects on viewers for decades too. Future research should probably be directed much more at elaborating and testing the kinds of interventions that parents, school, procedures, and the government can promote that will mitigate long-term effects and that would help to solve this social problem.
Scientific facts versus media misinformation
Brad J. Bushman’s article, “Media Violence and the American Public Scientific Facts Versus Media misinformation” (Bushman, 2001), was published in the Journal of American Psychological Association in July 2001. Bushman’s thesis is based on the following question: Does the level of violence on television cause real aggression? This literature review is based on the scientific facts effects of media violence and the opinion of the entertainment industry on this topic. The major arguments on this article are that the entertainment industry often claims that violent media simply reflect the violence that already exists in the world. On the other hand scientific evidence demonstrates that media violence does cause aggression. The author believes that media violence cause real aggression. In his article he shows the contrast opinions and he gives evidence that support each of the opinions. “Inventions such as television set, the digital computer, and the videocassette player forever changed the way children gain information about the world, including information about how violent the world is” (Bushman, 2001, p.479). In this scholarly article the author highlight different evidence that support the two different points of view. First, psychologists said that they have studied the effect of media violence on aggression for several decades. They said that their results are that media violence increase aggressive behavior on children. Brad J. Bushman show how the results of a study that scientist applied for this research are that an American child usually spends 40 hours per week watching TV. “These children are getting a heavy dose of media violence that can lead them to future aggressive behavior” (Bushman, 2001, p.484). The evidence the author use for the entertainment industry is that this industry often state that we lived in a violent society and that media just imitates the modes of life not the other way around. They also claim that their evidence is based on the real thinking, that means for example if TV does not exists, there would still be no less violence on the world.
JAPAN: Comparative Culture
Another journal article criticized the methods that some researchers have used to determine whether media causes real aggression. Some researchers argued that the murder rate increased in some regions after televisions sets were introduce. “Some researchers points out that Japanese television has some of the most violent imagery in the world, and yet Japan has much lower murder rate than other countries, including Canada and the United States, which have comparatively less violence on TV” (Funk, 2004, p.34). The author mentions that consideration should be take that children today grow up in a cultural environment that is designed to the specifications of a marketing strategy. Desensitization to violence should be further studied and individual differences and casual relationships should also be examined. It is important when talking about cultural differences to analyze the children cognitive development due to the fact that culture is influence on this aspect. “Cognition based theories assume that an essential feature of development is that individuals strive for greater understanding of the world around them” (Martin & Fabes, 2009, p.39). For example Piaget’s speculated that children of different ages use different kinds of thought process and that cognitive development is a process of developing in the intellectual means to adapt to the environment. All this is related to culture because children can perceive things differently depending on their culture.
Mental Models
It is important for this research to mention children’s mental models. This study examines if exposure to television violence affects children’s aggressive mental models. “Bandura’s social learning theory is based on his idea that individuals are greatly influenced by other people. Bandura believes that children and adults imitate, or model their behavior of other people” (Martin & Fabes, 2009, p.38). Once a mental model is constructed, it may be used to guide incoming information, to reason and problem-solve and to assist in or direct recall (Hight, 2007). One area of schema and mental model research focuses on the way individuals acquire them. This model of schema and acquisition concentrates on children’s learning of particular information and how grouping or categorizing occurs in conjunction with these models. “As a social scientific endeavor, sociologists need to create concepts that can do analytic work that goes beyond common sense, most especially since common sense is often actually flat out wrong” (Loseke, 1999, p.111). After analyzing the result the conclusion is that children regularly imitate their favorite cartoon character. Another finding was that violent character type appears to have greater effect on children’s aggressive mental models than the neutral characters. “The effect of stereotypical violent cartoon characters is greater than it is for neutral cartoon characters” (Hight, 2007). A single exposure to violent cartoons may help very young children establish mental models for aggression. As we can see, children are influenced by cartoons characters some of the findings state that the reason why is because nowadays most children are exposed to media violence. It is important that any form of evidence in this empirical study should be analyzed for future research methods.
Lack of social imagination
The first study is about the lack of social imagination exhibited through the U.S. American culture. This caused Americans to not understand the media in ways that are oppositional or media literature. “U.S. American discourse about media violence is fixated on the question how individuals, especially children, are affected. However, we are rarely discuss the more qualitative and complex question of how the ideology of our society is impacted and reflected by violence in the media” (Rockler, pg 42). The author emphasizes that one of the problems is that people rarely ask historical questions about why violence in the media has become so prevalent in our era, or economic questions about how media corporations benefit from media violence, especially through the international exportation of violent media. I strongly agree with the author’s point of view, these kinds of discussions about media among students are evidence that the some students exhibit a lack of social imagination. To explore if Americans lack a social imagination when discussing violence in the media the author administer an anonymous questionnaire to 127 undergraduate students about the impact of violence in the media on individuals and society. On the questionnaire the author used conceptualization of the sociological imagination to interpret to what degree the students exhibited a sociological imagination in their discussion of violence in the media. The result was that their responses suggested lack of social imagination in three ways: 1) they understood the impact of media violence in personal but not in political terms: 2) they understood media effects in simplistic and unsophisticated ways; 3) they understood themselves to be passive media consumers, as opposed to active media citizens. The author states that she designed this study to be a starting point to theorize the lack of social imagination in U.S. discourse about media. The small and specialized sample used in these questionnaires is a limitation to this study, and I feel that further research is needed to examine how additional groups of audience members employ or neither employ social imagination.
General Aggression Models
Another empirical article is about how the general Aggression Model predicts that exposure to violent media increases aggressive behavior. It is also about recent developments in neuroscience that that have allowed scientists to understand the interaction between the psychological and physiological mechanism. This article reviews that there in unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts. This article also reviews the findings of past research on violent media and explores how the developments of violent videogames present social scientists with new empirical questions. As media technology has advanced, the amount of time that a children and adolescents spend with it has increased (Carnagey, 2007). The findings are that videogames are a qualitatively different from media than television and film, primarily because video games are more interactive and immersive. “Players of violent videogames actually engage in virtual violent actions, receive direct reward for those actions, closely identify with the character they control, and actively rehearse aggressive behavioral scripts” (Carnagey, 2007). One of the evidence that is found on this article is that the research has demonstrated that individuals with a history of high exposure to violent videogames have different physiological reactions to scenes of real violence than do individuals with a low exposure history.
The researcher put participants with varying degree of exposure to violent videogames by showing them a series of negative photos, half violent and half non-violent. Results demonstrate that high exposure to violent videogames was associated with decreased in brain reaction. The author says that neuroimaging tools are essential to assist in testing the casual association between brain reactions while engaging in acts of virtual violence and subsequent real life aggression. This type of research can provide more insights into the effects of exposure to violent media by examining the affective and cognitive components of General Aggression Models at a neural level.
Emotional effects of violent television news
Other articles like “Emotional Effects of Violent Television News” (Swhwab & Winterhoff-Spunk, 2008), who was published on the Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications stated that media violence do cause real aggression. This article contains a study where the authors examined the influenced of violent television news on viewers’ emotional experiences and facial expressions. In this study we can see how emotions are primarily triggered by events that are evaluated as real, which is why one expects that emotional effects should be stronger when watching no fictional genres such as TV news. They analyzed the subjective feelings while watching violent TV news as well as facial expressions. On the first study the results indicate that the type of violence portrayed in a news report influences the intensity and mixture of experienced subjective feelings.
The participants showed negative feelings and less enjoyment while watching unintentional violent news. On the other hand participants showed stronger negative feelings, anger, fear and sadness when they were exposure to intentional violent news. On the stuffy of the facial expression the results were that TV viewers do not respond all the time with negative facial expressions. Viewers showed the most contempt while watching intentional violence, less while viewing unintentional violence (Swhwab & Winterhoff-Spunk, 2008). Mention the study is important because the reader can gain knowledge on how the study was made, what type of study was and by understanding the study they can get a better opinion towards the topic. By putting this study step by step the authors got credibility because this study’s result agree with other empirical studies
The authors took in consideration the different emotional process and they also took into consideration the different emotional components and different emotional states, instead of limiting research to a single emotional aspect. Swhwab and Winterhoff-Spunk abilities in this type of research are really good that in this article they created an atmosphere of knowledge and good investigation.
My overall conclusion is that these empirical studies are basically aim to learn more about the effects of media violence and future aggression. Another fact that I found important on these empirical research was to find out the opinion of the contrast point of view, in this case the point of view of the entertainment industry. It is important to always know both parts of the story so we can make a better judgment. However, the majority of studies deal with media violence and its effects on children and they support my hypothesis. My concern of talking about media violence and its effects arise from being a parent myself. I think is extremely important to be informed that way we know how this issue affects our children. All of the studies have their own important characteristics and they lead us to the same conclusion: exposure to media violence does cause aggression on children; due to the fact that they are negatively influence by media violence. Further research is needed to examine additional information on this controversy topic of media violence and its effects.