TV Violence and Its Effect on Aggressive Behavior
Introduction
Television and media has remained a force to reckon with in terms of entertainment value, pervasiveness, and effectiveness in influencing personal perceptions and decisions. Television has, in more ways than one, helped build mega corporations through product advertisements, created bigger than life celebrities, and shaped standards of beauty, wealth, good and evil. There is a reason why mega corporations invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in television advertisements to promote their products: television makes money. Lots and lots of them. However, recent studies have cited increasing violence in TV programming. In the flurry of things, amidst the flashy advertisements, crashing cars in adventure series, and dramatic violence on TV, one might ask: when does business entrepreneurship end, and where does social responsibility begin? For a country that prides itself for its independence and individuality, setting boundaries in many aspects of daily life is bound to be a tedious task.
Social responsibility has been the buzz word in the corporate world for some time now. The recent years saw more and more companies investing resources on more socially-responsible practices, such as human resource development initiatives, donations, community organizing, and such. While initiatives such as these are increasing, still, much remains to be done. Experts are citing increasing adult aggressive behavior for both males and females as a result of media violence. Identification with aggressive TV characters and perceived realism of TV violence also predict later aggression, according to them. The following sections will endeavor to tackle the various aspects and factors affecting media violence and its effect to aggressive behavior.
Perceived television violence and its beginnings
According to Murray (2003), concern about the impact of television violence began with the start of television broadcasting in the United States. Although the first commercial television station was licensed by the Federal Communications Commission in 1941, regular broadcasting did not begin until after World War II and became established later in 1947 or 1948. Nevertheless, the first official expression of concern about TV violence occurred in the U.S. Congress in Hearings in the Senate and House in 1952 and 1954. What is new, however, is the breadth and depth of research that has been accumulating on the impact of TV violence and, more recently, emerging studies of children’s brain activations while watching TV violence.
Murray’s studies on children’s brain responses to TV violence and brainmapping yielded a comprehensive bibliography of 1,945 reports on children and TV, with about 600 of these reports dealing with the issue of TV violence.
Empirical evidences
Through the years, empirical evidence has shown that the effects of childhood exposure to media violence last into young adulthood and also substantially increases aggressive behavior. Huesmann et. al (2003), cited substantial evidence (including results from their study on longitudinal relations between children’s exposure to TV violence and their aggressive and violent behavior in young adulthood) that exposure to media violence is one such long-term predisposing and short-term precipitating factor.
According to Berkowitz (1993), long term effects of media violence are generally believed to be primarily due to long-term observational learning cognitions such as schemas, beliefs, and biases supporting aggression.
In 2000, Rose cited a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology saying violent television programming impede the viewer’s memory of the commercial messages run during a program. The study, by Dr. Brad Bushman of Iowa State University, found that that the negative effects of television violence on memory for commercial messages can be partly due to the anger induced by the violent content. Part of the study entailed 320 students (160 men and 160 women) reporting their moods after watching four videotapes to determine whether anger obstructed their ability to remember the content of the commercials. After viewing either violent or nonviolent videotapes, the students completed a mood form that assessed their anger and positive emotions (alertness, determination and enthusiasm). The study revealed that the “anger incurred after watching the violent videotapes did seem to have a lot to do with impairing their memory for the commercials because those who watched the violent videotape reported feeling more angry. The respondents also had lower scores on the brand name recognition, brand name recall and commercial message recall measures,” the study revealed. “This is not good for advertisers because in the time they hope viewers are absorbing their commercial messages, viewers may actually be trying to calm their anger brought on by what they just watched,” according to Dr. Bushman.
Moreover, according to Dr. John Murray’s (of Kansas State University) testimony during the 2003 US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation’s hearing on the impact of entertainment violence on children, the three most noted effects of violent programming are: aggression, desensitization, and fear. These effects have been documented in various studies over the past 50 years, and represent a disturbing set of outcomes of violence viewing, according to Dr. Murray. Viewing televised violence can lead to increases in aggressive behavior and/or changes in attitudes and values favoring the use of aggression to solve conflicts, he said. Further, extensive violence viewing may lead to decreased sensitivity to violence and a greater willingness to tolerate increasing levels of violence in society; and could also produce the “mean world syndrome,” in which viewers overestimate their risk of victimization, Dr. Murray said.
Brainmapping and TV violence
In pursuit of providing greater insights on TV violence and its perceived effects of promoting aggressive behavior, Dr. Murray and his colleagues embarked on a brainmapping endeavor. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Dr. Murray’s team mapped the brains of eight children, ages 8 to 13, while they watched violent and nonviolent tapes. All of the participants were normal, healthy, excelled in school, and had no history of problems at school or at home. They were made to view a total of six, three-minute video clips -two of which contained violence, two without violence, and the remaining two clips served as controls. Dr. Murray’s team continuously scanned the children’s brains while they were watching the clips, as well as before and after viewing to determine the anatomical features. The scans confirmed Dr. Murray’s team’s expectations. They saw emotional arousal among the children to the videos of violence, which manifested in significant right hemisphere activations. Moreover, Dr. Murray saw activities in the amygdala – an area of the brain that senses danger in the environment and prepares the body for “fight or flight”. Further, the scans also revealed that an area of the prefrontal cortex-the premotor cortex-was activated while viewing violence and this suggested that the youngsters were “thinking about moving,” according to Dr. Murray. He said that while watching a clip on boxing, there was a possible attempt among the children at imitation of the boxing movements-thinking about but not able to actually imitate the movements. This is similar to what parents have observed when they see young children watching kick-boxing actions; the young viewers are likely to start imitating the movements on their brothers and sisters, Dr. Murray said.
Further, Dr. Murray’s group was also surprised at another finding – there was activation in the back of the brain, the posterior cingulate. This area, they said, is devoted to long-term memory storage for significant or traumatic events. Activation of the posterior cingulated usually happens when patients with cases of severe post-traumatic stress disorder are asked to recall events and images that caused them distress. Dr. Murray’s team was therefore astounded to discover that the children in their study, while not having post traumatic stress disorder, exhibited similar symptoms when watching traumatic and dramatic violence.
Effects of “third” variables
To provide a more comprehensive view of the effect of media violence, Huesmann et. al examined the effect of what they call the “third” variables or the demographic characteristics such as the educational level of socioeconomic status of the family and the predisposition to violent behavior when exposed to violent programming. Lower income and lower educational status have generally been found to correlate with more exposure both to TV in general and to media violence in particular. They also often correlate with greater risk for violent and aggressive behavior. Similarly, a child’s intellectual ability might also be hypothesized to account for some of the longitudinal relation between childhood exposure to media violence and adult aggression. Scores on IQ and achievement tests are known to be negatively correlated with both TV violence viewing and aggression, according to Huesmann et. al.
After a number of structural modeling analyses, Huesmann et. al concluded that the violent effects were not simply a consequence of lower socioeconomic status children or less intellectually able children both watching more violence and being more at risk for aggressive and violent behavior. The structural models show that for both boys and girls, habitual early exposure to TV violence is predictive of more aggression by them later in life independent of their own initial childhood aggression, their own intellectual capabilities, their social status as measured by their parents’ education or their fathers’ occupations, their parents’ aggressiveness, their parents’ mobility orientation, their parents’ TV viewing habits (including violence viewing), and their parents’ rejection, nurturance, and punishment of them in childhood. Furthermore, the structural models suggest that being aggressive in early childhood has no effect on increasing males’ exposure to media violence as adults and only a small effect for females behave aggressively and violently.
Recommendations
Huesmann et. al recommended that further research be done to elaborate and test different interventions that parents, schools, producers, and the government can promote that will mitigate these long-term effects. The easiest way to reduce the effects of media violence, according to them, is to reduce children’s exposure to such violence. Prevention programs aimed at reducing exposure could obviously be targeted either at the production sources of the violence or at the child viewing the violence. In a society with strong protections for free speech, it is probably always going to be easier to target prevention efforts at the viewing child than at the producer, according to them.
However, they said that a more informed legal debate is needed. Broadcasters and film and program makers cannot avoid all responsibility for what children are exposed to. The argument that “people watch it so we give it to them” is not valid in a modern socially conscious society, and it is unrealistic to expect parents to control completely what children watch in a society with multiple TVs in each household, VCRs everywhere, and both parents working, Huesmann et. al averred.
References
Berkowitz, L. (1993). Aggression: Its causes, consequences, and control.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bushman, B. n.d. Effects of television violence on memory for commercial messages. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol.4, No. 4.
Huesmann, R. et. al. 2003. Longitudinal relations between children’s exposure to TV violence and their aggressive and violent behavior in young adulthood: 1977-1992. Developmental Psychology. Vol. 39, No. 2, 201-221.
Murray, J. 2003. Testimony during the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Hearing on Neurobiological Research and the Impact of Media, retrieved on December 20, 2005 from http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=706&wit_id=1883
Rose, J. 2000. TV violence, a sonata in three parts: data, hypothesis, and conclusion, retrieved on December 20, 2005 from http://www.ceptualinstitute.com/nuc/es004-tvviolence.htm
