Media Influences on Aggression: Violent films and TV A01

Question 1

Labatory and Field experiments:
A consistent finding ?

Answer 1

Is that those who watch violent scenes subsequently display more aggressive behaviour and have more aggressive emotions compared to those who did not watch violent scenes.

Question 2

Labatory and Field experiments: Bjorkqvist (1985).

Answer 2

Aims: To see whether exposure to violent films/media would increase rates of aggression

Procedures:
- exposed 5-6 year old Finnish children to either violent or non-violent films, compared with children who had viewed a non-violent film.

Findings:
- Those who had watched the violent films were subsequently rated much higher on measures of physical aggression.

Conclusions:
- That exposure to violent media did increase rates of aggression.

Question 3

What are Longitudinal studies ?

Answer 3

They allow researchers to track individuals over time to assess the impacts of early experiences on behaviour later in life.

Question 4

Longitudinal studies: Huesmann et al (2003).

Answer 4

Aims: To test the long term impacts of exposure to Violent films and TV on aggression.

Procedures:
- Studied 557 children aged between 6 to 10, in Chicago in 1977.
- Further studied 329 of these children (now adults) 15 years later in 1992.

Findings:
- Habitual early exposure to TV violence was predictive of adult aggression later in life, applying to both boys and girls.

Question 5

Meta-analyses: What do they allow researchers to do?

Answer 5

Allow researchers to aggregate the findings of many different individual studies of the effects of media violence.

Question 6

Meta-analyses: Bushman and Huesmann (2006)

Answer 6

Aims: To look at the findings from a range of studies testing the effects of violent films and TV on aggression.

Procedures:
- Meta analysis of 431 studies
- Involving over 68,000 participants
- 264 studies involved children, 167 involved adults.

Findings:
- Significant effect sizes for exposure to media violence on aggressive behaviour, aggressive thoughts and angry feelings.
- Short term effects of violent media were greater for adults than children
- Long term effects were greater for children than for adults.