EFFECTS OF MEDIA VIOLENCE

EFFECTS OF MEDIA VIOLENCE

Most of the public concern and scientific study of the perceived violent reality of media centers around the effects of viewing televised violence. The effect that many think of first is modeling, when people imitate violent behavior that they see on television. However, this is only one of several effects. The research on the different effects has been driven by diverse theoretical frameworks (see chapter 2); for example, studies of behavioral effects have most often been driven by social learning/cognitive theory, and studies of attitudinal effects often draw on oncultivation theory. The following section examines several different effects of media violence in turn and the evidence supporting each of them. We begin with what is perhaps the most immediate effect of viewing violence: Watching violence induces fear.

Fear

Much of the research on fear responses to violent media comes from the laboratory of Joanne Cantor (1996, 1998a, 2002), who concludes that “transitory fright responses are quite typical, that enduring and intense emotional disturbances occur in a substantial proportion of children and adolescents, and that severe and debilitating reactions affect a small minority of particularly susceptible individuals of all ages” (Cantor, 1996, p. 91). Overall, there is a correlation between the hours of television viewed and the

Violence: Watching All That Mayhem Really Matters 262

prevalence of symptoms of psychological trauma like anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress (Singer, Slovak, Frierson, & York, 1998).

Fear-Inducing Images. Different categories of stimuli and events differentially produce fear responses in viewers of different ages. Distortions of natural forms (e.g., monsters and mutants) are very scary to preschoolers but typically less so to older children. Depictions of dangers and injuries (e.g., attacks, natural disasters) are more scary to upper elementary school children than to preschoolers, in part because the older children are cognitively able to anticipate danger and its possible consequences and thus

be fearful before the actual event occurs. The older the child, the more able

he or she is to think abstractly and be frightened by seeing situations of endangerment to others. Sometimes two siblings viewing together may be afraid of very different aspects of a movie, or one, not necessarily the younger, may be afraid while their sibling is not. For example, consider two brothers watching a movie about a benevolent alien visiting from outer space. The preschooler may be afraid of the fantastic form of the alien, while the older child may be afraid during the scenes where he recognizes that the friendly alien or sympathetic humans may be in potential danger from others. Alternatively, the younger child may not be afraid at all—in fact, he may love the cute little alien—and may not be able to think abstractly enough to understand why his brother is afraid of the potential endangerment.

Responses to Fear. Cantor and Oliver (1996; see also Cantor, 1998a, 2002) identify some principles to predict fear responses in children. First, the older the child, the more that a character’s behavior, relative to appearance, is important in predicting fear responses, although all children will be more fearful of an ugly than an attractive character. Second, as children grow older, they become more responsive to realistic dangers and less responsive to fantasy dangers in the media. Third, and closely related, the older the child, the more able he or she is to be afraid of increasingly abstract dangers. In fact, very young children tend not to be very afraid of abstract threats. For example, fear responses to a 1980s movie about nuclear war in the heartland of the United States found young children to be the least afraid and adults the most afraid (Scholfield & Pavelchak, 1985), with the number of parental reports of their children discussing the movie with them increasing with the age of the child (Cantor, Wilson, & Hoffner, 1986).

When they are afraid of watching something scary, preschoolers tend to cope by using non-cognitive strategies like eating, drinking, covering their eyes, or clutching an object. School-age children tend to use and respond well to cognitive strategies like verbal explanations, reminders of the unreality of the situation, or instructions to think about the danger in a new, less threatening way, provided that the explanation is at an appropriate level

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It is, however, quite difficult to totally reason away a strong media-induced fear in a young child.

Several studies (Cantor & Oliver, 1996; Harrison & Cantor, 1999; Hoekstra, Harris, & Helmick, 1999) found that practically all young adults were able to readily remember an incident of being extremely scared by a movie as a child or teen. At least the memories, and perhaps some of the effects as well, are long lasting. Some effects reported are general fear/anxiety, specific fears (e.g., fear of swimming after seeing Jaws), sleep disturbances, and nightmares. See Box 9.1 for some actual memories reported by Cantor’s participants.

Sometimes self-report may not be a completely adequate measure of induced fear. For example, Sparks, Pellechia, and Irvine (1999) found that certain “represser” personality types reported low levels of negative affect in response to watching a 25-minute segment from the horror film When a Stranger Calls but high levels of physiological arousal, as measured by skin conductance. In a similar vein, Peck (1999, as cited in Cantor, 2002) found that in general women’s verbal reports of fear in response to watching scary scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street were more intense than men’s, but in some cases men’s physiological responses were more intense than women’s, if the victim in the scene was male. Thus, it is possible that in some circumstances some people either cannot or do not accurately report their fear experienced, and we cannot assume that self-reports of fear are completely adequate.

BOX 9.1