Study links violent TV to aggressive adulthood
Both boys and girls who watch a lot of violence on
television have a heightened risk of aggressive adult behavior, including
spouse abuse and criminal offenses, no matter how they act in childhood, a new
study says.
While the
results may not be surprising, experts say the study is important because it
included hundreds of participants and showed the effect in females as well as
males.
The participants
were interviewed at ages 6 to 9 and again in their early 20s, making the study
one of the few to follow children into adulthood to gauge the long-term effects
of televised violence.
The findings are
presented in the March issue of the journal Developmental Psychology by
psychologists L. Rowell Huesmann and colleagues at the University of Michigan's
Institute for Social Research.
Huesmann said
televised violence suggests to young children that aggression is appropriate in
some situations, especially when it is used by charismatic heroes. It also
erodes a natural aversion to violence, he said.
He recommended
that parents restrict viewing of violent TV and movies by young children and
preteens as much as possible.
The analysis
argued against the idea that aggressive children seek out TV violence, or that
the findings were the result of the participants' socioeconomic status or
intelligence, or their parents' child-
rearing practices.
The study
involved 329 adults who were initially surveyed as children in the late 1970s.
Researchers interviewed them again as adults, along with their spouses or
friends, and checked crime records.
As children, the
participants were rated for exposure to televised violence after they chose
eight favorite shows from 80 popular programs for their age group and indicated
how often they watched them. The programs were assessed by researchers for
amount of physical violence. Programs such as "Starsky and Hutch,"
"The Six Million Dollar Man" and Warner Brothers'
"Roadrunner" cartoons were deemed very violent.
As young adults,
men in the study who had scored in the top 20 percent on childhood exposure
were about twice as likely as other men to have pushed, grabbed or shoved their
wives during an argument in the year preceding the interview. Women who had
scored in the top 20 percent were about twice as likely as other women to have
thrown something at their husbands.
For one or both
sexes, these "high TV-violence viewers" were also more likely than
other study participants in the previous 12 months to have shoved somebody in
anger; punched, beaten or choked an adult; or committed a crime or a moving
traffic violation.
Along with
viewing of violent TV, the participants had been asked as children how much
they identified with violent TV characters and how realistic they judged
various violent TV shows to be.
Researchers
found that high ratings on any of the three childhood measures predicted higher
ratings of overall aggression in adulthood. It made no difference how
aggressive the participants had been as children.
Dennis Wharton,
spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, said not all studies
find a relationship between TV viewing and violent behavior. "I think the
jury is still out about whether there is a link," he said.
The American
Psychological Association, however, has concluded that viewing violence on TV
or other mass media does promote aggressive behavior, particularly in children.
Other mental-health and medical groups have taken similar stands.
Joanne Cantor,
professor emerita of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
said the new study was "a very strong addition to what I consider a large
amount of data that points in the same direction."
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