Intervening variables in the TV violence–aggression relation: Evidence from two countries.

Abstract

Samples of 758 children in the United States and 220 children in Finland were interviewed and tested in each of 3 years in an overlapping longitudinal design covering Grades 1 to 5. For girls in the United States and boys in both countries, TV violence viewing was significantly related to concurrent aggression and significantly predicted future changes in aggression. The strength of the relation depended as much on the frequency with which violence was viewed as on the extent of the violence. For boys the effect was exacerbated by the degree to which the boy identified with TV characters. Path analyses suggested a bidirectional causal effect in which violence viewing engenders aggression, and aggression engenders violence viewing. No evidence was found that those children predisposed to aggression or those with aggressive parents are affected more by TV violence. However, a number of other variables were found to be correlates of aggression and violence viewing. The most plausible model to explain these findings seems to be a multiprocess model in which violence viewing and aggression affect each other and, in turn, are stimulated by related variables. Observational learning undoubtedly plays a role, but its role may be no more important than the attitude changes that TV violence produces, the justification for aggressive behavior that TV violence provides, or the cues for aggressive problem solving that it furnishes.

The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and Research

“…As for viewer characteristics that depend on perceptions of the plot, those viewers who perceive the violence as telling about life more like it really is and who identify more with the perpetrator of the violence are also stimulated more toward violent behavior in the long run [27,30,33,38]. Taken together these facts mean that violent acts by charismatic heroes, that appear justified and are rewarded, are the violent acts most likely to increase viewer's aggression.…”

“…The relationship is less strong than that observed in laboratory experiments, but it is nonetheless large enough to be socially significant; the correlations obtained are usually are between .15 and .30. Moreover, the relation is highly replicable even across researchers who disagree about the reasons for the relationship [e.g., 29] and across countries [30,31].…”

A biopsychosocial model of the development of chronic conduct problems in adolescence.

“…Huesmann, Lagerspetz, and Eron (1984) found that identification with violent role models occurred as an outcome of frequent exposure to televised violence and that this identification mediated the effect of television violence on aggressive behavioral development over time, Asher found that chronic competitive and self-defense goals (in contrast with relational goals; Renshaw & Asher, 1982) and preoccupation with loneliness (Asher, Parkhurst, Hymel, & Williams, 1990) were related to aggressive conduct problems. Baldwin (1992) summarized several ways that social knowledge structures exert an impact on social information processing, including selective attention to cues, premature judgments about stimuli, biased interpretations of ambiguous information, and biased expectancies for the outcomes of events.…”

The Role of Violent Media Preference in Cumulative Developmental Risk for Violence and General Aggression

“…First, extant developmental studies of violent media effects usually involve normative, typical samples of youth from community populations. The Huesmann et al (2003) USA study and the Huesmann, Lagerspetz, and Viemero Finland study (Huesmann et al 1984;Viemero 1996) relied on cohorts drawn from suburban schools and intended to be representative of those communities. Anderson et al (2007) sampled from school populations of rural and suburban children.…”