Negative Effects of Music on the Mind

Today many people believe that violent music has aggressive and hostile reactions in children, because those who listen to aggressive music often act aggressively too. Brad Bushman, Professor of Psychology and Communication Studies at the University of Michigan, in his article Media violence and the American public in American Psychologist for 2001 says, that ''measuring such correlation (between agressive music and its consequences in real life) in laboratory studies would clearly be unethical, much the same way as experimental studies of smoking and lung cancer would have been unethical.'' What Bushman means is that not every child is affected by violence in music the same way. And sometimes it is hard to determine whether or not aggressive behavior is caused primarily by harsh music, because there are many other factors that affect youngsters’ manners like media, society, family, etc.
It is well known that children love to imitate adults. Luckily, there are many well-behaved kids who have reliable parents and thus better models to copy than rap-stars, for instance, who do not care if they teach somebody else’s off-springs wrong stuff. On the other hands, there are children who are already being exposed to violence in their everyday life and what these kids hear and see on stage may play crucial role in their decision-making. Therefore, we cannot ignore that not only can musical lyrics manipulate kid’s judgment psychologically, but singer’s appearance also negatively influences children s impression about appropriate behavior in public.
Many performers use aggressive lyrics in their songs and our children are often exposed to the profanity. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied the Billboard charts, looking at the entire top 279 songs of 2005. They found that one third of the list had violence related lyrics. Nearly 80% of rap songs mentioned killing, racism, and alcohol and drug use, followed by 37% of country music lyrics, 20%