4. Media Psychology Flashcards
What is the average ‘recreational’ screen time for a teenager?
over 5 hours and 35 minutes a day
What is the average amount of hours spent on the top 7 social medias for teenagers?
4.8 hours a day
What is the global average of hours per day using the internet?
6.40
By the age of 18, how many acts of violence and murders have children witnessed (estimated in the early 2000s)
up to 40 000 murders
this is just on tv alone
What was the supreme court decision on media violence about?
Having fines if you sell video games to minors (when they are rated 18+)
What was the Gruel statement
Scientific research on violent video games clearly shows that such games are causally related to later aggressive behaviour in children and adolescents.
Effects are both immediate and long term.
Violent video games have increased aggressive behaviour, increased aggressive thinking, aggressive feelings, physiological desensitisation to violence, decreases prosocial behaviour.
Short term: loss of activation in the amgydala (desensitised)
Longterm: hostile attributional bias, aggressive problem solving
What is the ‘risk factor’ approach?
- exposure to violent media isn’t necessary to causing anything more than lower level aggression
- problem arises when combined with other risk factors and a lack of protective factors
- risk factors: peer delinquency, media vilence, peer victimisation, neighbourhood crime, gender, abusive parenting, access to weapons, mental health issues
- protective factors (caring community, warm parenting)
Underlying psych/neuro processes: biology and brain
Processing and reactions to TV violence:
- observations of TV violence
- encoding of aggressive scripts, rehearsal of scripts by imitative behaviour and fantasy, increased accesibility of aggressive scripts
- aggressive reactions to interpersonal conflict
- greater identification with TV characters, lower academic achievement , decreased popularity, frustration and situational readiness to aggress
- greater interest in TV violence
Outline the brain mapping study at the University of Texas
- pilot fMRI study of 8 children
- compared activations of violent and non-violent TV
Replicated finding:
- reduced involvement of prefrontal cortex
- activation of limbic system (amygdala) –> increase in emotional response - fight/flight, responses may be more automatic
- Activation in posterior cingulate –> images of violence seem to be stored in this part of the brain - pattern is similar to that found for the storage of trauma memories
- right hemisphere is most active
Findings of desensitisation
- tested habitual players of violent vs non-violent games
- nonviolent gamers had an increase in emotional response regions when playing the violent game
- whereas violent gamers demonstrated suppression of these regions
Overall brain imaging findings
while engaging with violent media there is:
- reduced activity in PFC
- reduction in executive functions including attention
- reduction in inhibitory control
- more activity in centres that produce unconsidered action (fight / flight)
- desensitisation to the suffering of others
Outline psychological acquisition of aggression from violent media games
- Associative learning (pairing of aggressive behaviour with multiple cues)
- aggressive behaviour is rewarded and not punished
- imitatoin
- desensitisation
If you have a lot of violent video game playing, you develop violent:
- beliefs and attitudes
- perceptual schemata
- expectation schemata
- behaviour scripts
- desensitisation
which result in increase in aggressive personality
Psychological remediation
In a forensic hospital sample, they took away MTV and remeasured aggression to find a significant reduction in aggression of all types.
Media and the whole person
- clinically important –> screen-based addictions
- most theories revolve around cognitive networks
- violent media seems to activate emotion and instinct centres and bypass behavioural inhibition mechanisms such as those in frontal lobe
- changes to neural networks via learning
- around 2-3 hour mark of recreational screentime is where it starts having negative impacts
- having an age appropriate media diet
