REEL VIOLENCE
U-M research seeks the seeds of violence
By Diane Swanbrow
U-M News Service
Three generations of U-M scientists searching for the causes and consequences of aggressive behavior have found one of the biggest factors staring us in the face: It’s a prominent feature of the living room, the kitchen, the back seat of the van, and even the kids’ bedrooms.
Repeated exposure to violent television and video games is a stronger influence on aggressive behavior than is living in poverty, engaging in substance abuse or having abusive parents, says Brad Bushman, a professor of psychology and communications studies and a research associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR)
In fact, the correlation between media violence and aggression is stronger than the link between condom use and reduced risk of HIV, or between second-hand smoke and lung cancer, Bushman says.
“Playing video games, particularly first-person shooter games, may be much more dangerous than watching violent television shows or movies,” says Bushman.
Bushman came to Michigan from Iowa State in 2003 to work with social psychologist L. Rowell Huesmann, who has a particular interest in the way media violence affects aggressive behavior. Huesmann explores the long-term impact of repeated exposure, while Bushman uses laboratory experiments to assess the immediate effects.
The two are now collaborating on a large-scale study that combines both approaches, funded by grants from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. But what they’re likely to find is already all too clear.
Huesmann also came to Michigan to work with a leader in the field. He arrived in 1992 to work with Leonard Eron, the psychologist who started a study that has now tracked four generations to see how aggressive behavior develops from childhood through adulthood, and how it is handed down from one generation to another. The study started in Columbia County, just north of New York City, where the researchers first interviewed all 856 third-graders in 1960, along with many of their parents. Eron and Huesmann have followed this group and their children for more than 40 years.
According to Huesmann, the Columbia County study clearly shows that the amount of violence children watch on television when they are young predicts how violently they will behave in adulthood. This effect is significant even when the researchers statistically control for childhood aggressiveness, social class, intelligence, and many other factors, including whether their parents used corporal punishment.
For example, in one recently published analysis, Huesmann and colleagues found that by the time men were in their early 20s, those who had been heavy viewers of violent TV shows between the ages of six and nine were twice as likely as other men to push, grab or shove their spouses. And they were three times as likely to be convicted of criminal behavior.
Women who were high-volume viewers of violent shows as young children were more than twice as likely as other women to have thrown something at their spouses and more than four times as likely as other young women to have punched, beaten or choked another adult.
When the children in the Columbia County study were eight years old, the most violent shows on television were "Gunsmoke" and "77 Sunset Strip." Even so, the study found large effects of heavy viewing of violence ten years later. At first, these effects showed up only in males. Then came "The Bionic Woman" and "Charlie’s Angels," giving little girls aggressive characters to identify with, too, and Huesmann started seeing the effects in young women. The level of media violence has also changed since the study began, becoming increasingly graphic, even in shows aimed at children.
But this factor pales in comparison to “first-person shooter” video games in which the player adopts the persona of a heavily armed aggressor, killing scores of enemies as quickly as possible.
“Playing games is highly active, and it requires players to identify with violent characters,” Bushman say. “It also rewards aggression, and the amount of violence is almost continuous.”
Bushman has shown that playing violent video games actually changes brain function, desensitizing chronic players to real-life violence. Desensitization, which is basically a reduced emotional response to a repeated stimulus, is just one of the ways the brain is affected by exposure to violent images.
According to Huesmann, watching violence also “primes” aggressive scripts and beliefs, creating a heightened level of neural excitation that spreads to other thoughts stored in nearby areas of the brain. Paradoxically, then, exposure to violent media violence both decreases emotional response to violence and increases neurological arousal – a one-two punch that can be lethal.
“A high and steady diet of TV violence in early childhood increases the risk that both females and males from all social backgrounds will become violent, aggressive adults,” Huesmann says, without any of the typical academic qualifications. “Media violence can affect any child from any family, not just children who are already violence-prone.”
