Week 6-Violence, Aggression, and Crime

Question 1

What’s the link between Media Consumption and Content? (Statista, 2019)

Answer 1

-Important to consider whether we are engaging with lots of relevant content

-In each age group, is there not fewer than 10 hours per week spent watching TV

-When we get older and having more autonomy (e.g., going out, deciding own time) would likely mean reduced TV consumption

Question 2

What’s the prevalence with violent content?

Answer 2

■ 60% of TV programmes contain violence (Donnerstein, 2001)

■ Relational aggression (focused on verbal types of aggression) depicted in over 90% of programs (Coyne, 2015)

■ By the time a child graduates high school, they will have seen 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence (Bushman & Anderson, 2001) (skeptical evidence though)

-The most violent type of media is arguably cartoons e.g., Tom & Jerry

Question 3

What’s Formal Content Analyses

Answer 3

Content analyses requires a research group to:
a) create a definition and coding system (e.g., what do you mean by media violence and is agreed what is and isn’t violent content)
b) establish reliability
c) code the data
d) complete a further reliability check and compile the results

■ Content analyses can be applied to any behaviour but have often addressed the prevalence of media violence e.g., if one type of media is problematic than the other.

Question 4

Example: What did Monk-Turner et al. (2004) find?

Answer 4

■ Looked at violence in 12 Popular American war films (1970-2002)

■ Coding for implements of violence, length of violence, gore (severity of violence), violence directed at non-combatants

■ Watched ‘We Were Soldiers’ (2002) to develop the coding scheme and establish reliability

■ Implements of violence: by hand, blades, primary weapons, small arms, artillery, explosives / bombs. Coded each time these were used.

■ Coded the primary weapon dependent on film and era e.g., musket or M-16 (as might be difficult to compare due to eras where weapons may have been less effective)

■ Gore (wound from an act of violence): 1 (least gory) – 5 (most gory)

■ “Due to concerns regarding subjectivity in coding gore, five coders coded for gore. When there was any discrepancy in coding, the majority rule applied. Inter-coder reliability was excellent. Rarely was
there discussion on how to code gore. We believe that differences in what was perceived as gory varied primarily by gender. Male coders tended to code gore more conservatively than female coders.” (p6)

Question 5

How can we Measure Violence and Aggression and what are some issues with trying to measure this?

Answer 5

■ No single accepted definition of violence

■ Coding of one individual or all characters

■ Continuous coding or at specific time points only

■ Is your definition / coding scheme specific to one programme type only (e.g., soap operas) or are you going to apply this to all programmes (e.g., shown on one channel or at a particular time)

■ Physical or verbal aggression or both types

■ If you are including verbal aggression does that need to be directed at a person or will you include it if about someone

■ Are you taking the severity of violence into account or just prevalence

■ If you are taking severity into account how, is it the intention, specific act or weapon use, or level of injury

■ If you are focusing on prevalence, are you assessing whether it occurs in each episode or how regularly

■ How will you treat violence ‘off-screen’. Will you be coding sound and visual

■ Are you recording any other information e.g., type perpetrator or victim

-These findings are very glossed over when you consider how measurements may differ

Question 6

What’s the evidence between media violence and physical aggression?

Answer 6

■ Coker et al. (2015) Correlation between media violence and physical aggression

■ Coyne (2015) Viewing relational aggression on TV associated with future relational aggression. When using longitundinal studies, Initial levels of relational aggression did not predict future exposure to relational aggression on TV.
However, there was a bidirectional relationship between TV violence and physical aggression over time.

■ Effects of media violence on aggression has been reported by a range of professional organisations, including American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric
Association, the American Psychological Association, the US Surgeon General, and the International Society for Research on Aggression

-We don’t know the cause when correlational as it may be that people who are more naturally aggressive, may seek more aggressive media (therefore longitudinal studies would be better)

Question 7

What did Anderson et al. (2017) find when investigating a meta-analysis of screen violence and youth behaviour?

Answer 7

-Not a huge difference between experimental and cross-sectional studies with longitudinal studies

-There is a positive relationship with aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, arousal but a negative relationship with empathy and helping (so consuming media with aggression may just decrease pro-social behaviour)

-How do you measure aggressive behaviour? (Ethically) Aggression can be measured through non-violent behaviour e.g., a loud noise, adding more hot sauce, the level of negative feedback given etc., (not necessarily authentic)

Question 8

What’s the Smoking Analogy and how does it explain the impact of media violence?

Answer 8

■ 1. Not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer and not everyone who gets lung cancer is a smoker. (i.e., not everyone will become aggressive after media consumption)

■ 2. Smoking is not the only factor that causes lung cancer, but it is an important factor.

■ 3. The first cigarette can nauseate a person. Repeated exposure reduces these sickening effects and results in craving. (e.g., horror films may make you feel uncomfortable, but maybe who you watch it with makes it less frightening making you get used to it and enjoying the genre).

■ 4. The short-term effects are relatively innocuous (harmless) and dissipate fairly rapidly.

■ 5. The long-term, cumulative effects are relatively severe.

■ 6. Financial interests of the tobacco industry apparently led them to deny publicly that there was any scientific evidence supporting the claim.

Question 9

What’s the Increased Effect of emulating media violence?

Answer 9

• Aggressor is rewarded
• Cues in real life (which makes us similar to the perpetrator in the violent film)
• Similarity
• Realistic violence emulates media violence
• Aggressive individuals are more likely to emulate violence
• Aggression is justified

Question 10

What is Violence in Society? (Ferguson, 2014)

Answer 10

■ Researchers have attempted to answer “big V” questions using “little v” research e.g., leaving a word blank in a sentence to see if they will put an aggressive word -doesn’t reflect realistic aggression (Farley, 2012).

Ferguson (2014):
■ Movie violence and homicide rates (1920-2005)

■ Top-grossing movies were selected from every fifth year

■ Raters recorded at 1-minute intervals whether any violent acts had occurred during the previous minute

■ Mid-20th century small-to-moderate correlation between movie violence and homicide rates in the U.S.

■ This trend reversed in the early and latter 20th century (therefore there is change overtime; so no clear relationship you can point to overtime)

Question 11

What’s the impact of Music on Violence, Aggression & Crime?

Answer 11

■ Music has received less attention in the literature

■ Adolescents spend over two hours per day listening to music; duration increases over the course of adolescence

■ Aggression in music is fairly infrequent, substantial variation by genre Aggressive lyrics and music videos have both been related to aggressive behaviour

Coyne and Padilla-Walker (2015):
■ Explored longitudinal associations between listening to aggression, sex, and prosocial behaviour in music on a number of behavioural outcomes across a one-year period.

■ Listening to aggression in music was associated with increased aggression and decreased prosocial behaviour over time (even when controlling for initial behaviour)

■ Listening to sexual content in music was associated with earlier initiation of sexual intercourse and a trend for a higher number of sexual partners.

■ Prosocial behaviour in music was not associated with any behavioural outcome longitudinally.

Question 12

How is Crime reported in the Media?

Answer 12

Crime is a core component of media coverage:
1. Constant availability of material
2. Ease of material access (e.g. police news conferences)
3. Consistent interest from consumers
(Gordon & Heath, 1981)

■ Factors influencing the selection of news stories (Chibnall, 1977): Immediacy, Dramatization (e.g., soup thrown on the Mona Lisa), Personalization, Simplification, Titilation (i.e., scandal), Conventionalism (needs to fit in with the current/prior understanding), Structured, Access, Novelty

■ Additional factors influencing the selection of news content (Jewkes, 2004): Risk (always something happens which create risk to us), Sex, Proximity, Violence, Spectacle (‘if it bleeds it leads’) and Graphic Imagery, Children

Question 13

What did Johnson et al. (1997) find about the link between crime and media?

Answer 13

■ Researchers have expressed concern that portrayal of Black men and women as criminals, encourages people to believe that minorities are inherently more likely to commit crime

Johnson et al. (1997):
■ Participants exposed to violent or nonviolent newspaper stories
■ Then they read a scenario (describing violent acts)
■ Perceptions did not vary as a function of violence exposure for the White and ethnicity unspecified defendant
■ For Black defendants, participants exposed to violent information made more dispositional (i.e., they are inherently like that) attributions than those exposed to nonviolent information

Question 14

What’s the link between Crime and Fear?

Answer 14

■ Weaver and Wakshlag (1986: 141), ‘‘It is conceivable, given the high occurrence and exaggerated nature of criminal behaviour in televised entertainment fare (. . .), that some viewers overestimate the dangers in their environment and fear for their welfare more than circumstances warrant’’

Custers and Van den Bulck (2011):
■ 711 adults asked about their media use, perceived risk of experiencing crime and ability to cope
■ Crime drama exposure predicts risk perception (likelihood that it will happen) and perceived coping ability

■ But, Crime dramas often place considerable emphasis on the experience of the victim so these accounts may promote empathy and action BUT some may say it is fetishising the experiences of the victims

■ Hust et al. (2013): Exposure to prime-time crime dramas was associated with participants’ intentions to intervene in a
sexual assault

Question 15

What did Wright et al. (2016) find about the consumption of pornography?

Answer 15

■ 22 studies from 7 different countries

■ 20,820 participants included in the meta-analysis (males = 13,234, females = 7,586)

■ Consumption of pornography was associated with an increased likelihood of committing actual acts of sexual aggression (not moderated by biological sex, age group, study design, or whether the
study took place before or after widespread internet use)

■ Although violent pornography consumption produced a stronger association on average than nonviolent pornography consumption, the moderation was nonsignificant

■ Pornography consumption was associated with both verbal and physical sexual aggression; the association was significantly larger for verbal sexual aggression

Question 16

What’s the impact of Slasher Films and the ‘Final Girl’?

Answer 16

■ Slasher films “A commercially-released, feature-length film containing suspense-evoking scenes in which an antagonist, who is usually a male acting alone, attacks one or more victims…Scenes that dwell on the victim’s fear and explicitly portray the attack and its aftermath are the central focus of
the slasher film. (Molitor & Sapolsky, 1993, p235)

■ It is argued that slasher films often centre on the victimisation of women, but there are inconsistent findings

■ Sapolsky et al. (2003) – men are more likely to be victims (through body count number)

■ Welsh (2009) – women are more likely to be victims (broader view looking at things such as being terrorised rather than killed)

■ The ‘Final Girl’ genre - the lone surviving character, typically discovers the bodies of her friends, and confronts the central villain of the film

■ It has been argued that the final girl is often virginal or sexually unavailable (i.e., ‘good’ vs. evil)

■ Christie (1986) “ideal victim” – those perceived as legitimate victims

Question 17

What did Welsh (2010) find about Slasher films and the ‘Final Girl’?

Answer 17

■ Coded a sample of 50 English-language slasher films released between 1960 and 2009

■ Female characters were more likely to survive violent encounters than male characters

■ Female characters who didn’t engage in sexual activity were more likely to survive than female characters who did engage in sexual activity

■ Survival for male characters was not affected by sexual activity

■ Death scenes for female characters was longer than death scenes for male characters (more fetishised)

■ Death scenes for female characters who engaged in sexual activity were longer than death scenes for female characters who did not engage in sexual activity

■ Length of death scenes for male characters was not affected by sexual activity

Question 18

What’s the impact of Video games? (Gentile et al., 2014)

Answer 18

■ Children and adolescents from 6 primary and 6 secondary schools in Singapore (73% male)

■ Three-year longitudinal panel study (n = 3034, 2360, and 2232 in waves 1-3,
respectively)

■ Violent video game use influenced aggressive behaviour, mediated by aggressive cognitions suggesting that play influences behaviour by producing lasting changes in cognition

■ Aggressive cognitions of both younger and older children were significantly affected by video game playing

■ Video game violence effects on those both high and low in aggressiveness

Question 19

What’s the Consensus of video game violence in individual researchers? (Bushman and Cruz, 2013)

Answer 19

■ Media researchers from the Media Psychology and Technology Division of the American Psychological Association and from the Mass Communication Division of the International Communication Association

■ Video games increase aggression in children? 30% strongly agreed, 36% agreed, 17% were undecided, 10% disagreed, and 7% strongly disagreed

■ Members from the Counsel on Communication and Media of the American Academy of Pediatrics

■ Video games increase aggression in children? 62% of them strongly agreed, 28% agreed, 6% were undecided, 1% disagreed, and 3% strongly disagreed

Question 20

What’s the impact of Reality Television?

Answer 20

■ Increased presence of reality television in our media diets

■ Different forms of reality television including ‘surveillance’ reality television

■ Contains relational and verbal aggression and displays narcissistic behaviour

Gibson et al. (2014):
■ 127 college students
■ Watched a) surveillance reality TV including little or no aggression (Little People, Big World or The Little Couple), B) surveillance reality TV program including relational and verbal aggression (The
Jersey Shore or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), or c) violent crime drama (Dexter or CSI)

■ Exposure to surveillance reality TV featuring relational and verbal aggression increased physical aggression in comparison with both nonviolent surveillance TV and violent crime drama

Question 21

What’s the link between Children and Media Violence?

Answer 21

Johnson et al. (2002):
■ 700+ children tracked for 17 years
■ Significant association between early television viewing and subsequent aggressive behavior (including criminal violence) - even when controlling for previous aggressive behavior, childhood
neglect, family income, neighbourhood violence, parental education, and psychiatric disorders

Dillon and Bushman (2017):
■ 104 children aged 8 to 12 years
■ Assigned in pairs to watch a 20-minute PG-rated movie (containing or not containing guns)
■ Participant went to a different room, with a cabinet containing toys (e.g. lego, nerf guns). They were told they could play with any of the toys
■ One of the cabinet drawers contained a real 0.38-caliber hand gun (modified so that it could not fire)
-60% of American households owning a gun do not have it secured so this study is actually quite applicable to real life
■ Those who watched the movie containing guns showed more trigger pulls (2.8 vs .01) and more time holding the gun (53.1 sec vs 11.1 sec) (median)

Question 22

What’s the impact of Parental Mediation?

Answer 22

■ Parental mediation (also called parental media monitoring) describes the interactions parents have with their children about media use

■ Restrictive- parents set rules that limit the amount or type of media accessed

■ Active - parents discuss character’s choices, central themes etc with the child and try to encourage critical thinking (may be positive, negative, or neutral)

■ Coviewing – parents consuming media with their child

■ Restrictive mediation is the most common but, restrictions and ratings can make media content more attractive

■ Parental restrictions of TV sex and violence were positively related to adolescents’ favourable attitudes toward that content and to viewing that content with friends (Nathanson, 2002)

Question 23

What did Coyne et al (2016) find in their meta-analysis?

Answer 23

■ Of the initial 106 studies, 57 were included, representing N = 57,788 total participants

■ Restrictive mediation played a small, but statistically significant role in reducing media time and sexual outcomes but had no direct impact on aggression

■ Active mediation associated with lower aggression, sexual outcomes, and substance use

■ Coviewing associated with increased aggression and media use (saying nothing means the child views this as acceptance)

■ Parental report of child outcomes had a significantly greater effect size than child report

■ Other factors, e.g. gender, age of child didn’t appear to moderate the effects

Question 24

What’s Desensitisation and what are its impacts?

Answer 24

■ Desensitisation refers to the numbing of emotional reactions to events that typically cause a strong response

■ After time become less aroused and need more graphic portrayals to get same effect

■ Undermines feelings of concern, empathy and sympathy towards victims

■ May reduce anxiety about behaving aggressively

■ Parents exposed to a series of clips became increasingly desensitized to sex and violence in movies (Romer et al. 2014). Suggested ages of children’s exposure from the parent’s perspective declined from 16.9 to 13.9 for violence and from 17.2 to 14.0 for sex.