Community Magazine June 2003

38 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE s ” xc News of the latest research on the effects of television B oth boys and girls who watch a lot of violence on television have a heightened risk of aggressive adult behavior including spouse abuse and criminal offenses, no matter how they act in childhood, a new study says. While the results may not be surprising, experts say the study is important because it included hundreds of participants and showed the effect in females as well as males. The participants were interviewed at ages 6 to 9 and again in their early 20s, making the study one of the few to follow children into adulthood to gauge the long-term effects of televised violence. The findings are presented in the March issue of the jour- nal Developmental Psychology by psy- chologists L. Rowell Huesmann and col- leagues at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Huesmann said televised violence sug- gests 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 vio- lence, he said. He recommended that par- ents restrict viewing of violent TV and movies by young children and preteens as much as possible. The analysis argued against the idea that aggressive children seek out TV violence, or that the findings were due to the participants’ socioeco- nomic status or intelligence, or their par- ents’ childrearing practices. The study involved 329 adults who were initially surveyed as children in the late 1970s. Researchers interviewed them again as adults, along with their spouses or friends, and checked crime records. As chil- dren, the participants were rated for exposure to televised violence after they chose eight favorite shows from 80 popular programs for their age group and indi- cated how often they watched them. The programs were assessed by researchers for amount of physical violence. Programs such as “Starsky and Hutch,” “The Six Million Dollar Man” and Roadrunner cartoons were deemed very violent. As young adults, men in the study who had scored in the top 20 per- cent on childhood expo- sure 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 who had scored in the top 20 percent were about twice as likely as other women to have thrown something at their husbands. 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 violation. Along with viewing of violent TV, the participants had been asked as children 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 pre- dicted higher ratings of overall aggres- sion in adulthood. It made no difference how aggressive the participants had been as children. Dennis Wharton, spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, said not all studies find a rela- tionship between TV viewing and violent behavior. “I think the jury is still out about whether there is a link,” he said. The American P s y c h o l o g i c a l Association, however, has concluded that viewing violence on TV or other mass media does promote aggressive behavior, particularly in children. Other mental- health and medical groups have taken similar stands. The risk of child obesity is raised by 12-20% for each hour daily he/she spends watching television. Harvard study. 91% of the scenes containing displays of affection on television portray relationships outside of marriage. USA Today study Exposure to TV Violence as a Child Affects Adult Behavior MALCOLM RITTER, AP SCIENCE WRITER CM