Study shows TV encouraging aggression

Watching violence on television can encourage a child to act more aggressively even 15 years later, according to one of the few TV violence studies to follow children into adulthood.

The effect appeared in both sexes and appeared regardless of how aggressive a person was as a child, American researchers discovered.

The study linked violent TV viewing between the ages of six and nine to outcomes like spouse abuse and criminal convictions in a person’s early 20s.

Experts said the results were no surprise, but added that the study is important because it used a wide range of measures, included many participants and showed the effect in females as well as males.

The work is presented in this month’s 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 films by toddlers and those in their pre-teens as much as possible.

The study involved 329 adults who were initially surveyed as children in the late 1970s.

To check on adult aggressive behaviour, researchers interviewed them and their spouses or friends, and checked crime records.

As children, the participants were rated for exposure to televised violence after they chose eight favourite shows from 80 popular programmes for their age group and indicated how much they watched them.

The programmes were assessed by researchers for physical violence. Such programmes as Starsky and Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man and Roadrunner cartoons were deemed very violent.

As young adults, researchers found, men who had scored in the top 20% for 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 in the top 20% 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 offence.

Besides childhood exposure to violent TV, the participants had been asked as children about two other traits: 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 on a measure of overall aggression in adulthood.

Dennis Wharton, spokesman for America’s National Association of Broadcasters, said not all studies find a relationship between TV viewing and violent behaviour, and “I think the jury is still out about whether there is a link.”

The American Psychological Association, however, has concluded that viewing violence on TV or other mass media does promote aggressive behaviour, particularly in children.

Other mental health and medical groups have taken similar stands.

Joanne Cantor, professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the new study “a very strong addition to what I consider a large amount of data that points in the same direction.”

Craig Anderson, a violence researcher at Iowa State University, called the work “elegant in its design and execution”.