To What Extent Is Media Violence Related to Aggressive and Violent Behavior?

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To what extent is media violence related to aggressive and violent behavior? The amount of violence in the mass media is enormous, most experts agree that watching high levels of media violence makes viewers more susceptible to acting aggressively, and recent research supports this claim. For example, one survey of serious and violent young male offenders incarcerated in Florida showed that one fourth of them had attempted to commit a media inspired copycat crime (Surette,2002). A significant proportion of those teenage offenders noted that they paid close attention to media. Exposure to media violence also may distort our understanding of the meaning of others behavior, predisposing us to view even no aggressive acts by others aggressive. According to some, you are what you watch when it comes to violence in the media and its influence on violent behavior in young people. A new paper provides additional evidence that violent media does indeed impact adolescent behavior. The research to be, published in February 2009 in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, shows that even when other factors are considered, such as academic skills, encounters with community violence, or emotional problems, childhood and adolescent violent media preferences contributed significantly to the prediction of violence and general aggression. Paul Boxer, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers University in Newark, has been involved since 2004 in research funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) into media violence and its relation to serious youth violence and criminal behavior. Although a relationship between media violence and violent behavior has been acknowledged for some 40 years, much of the research was usually done in a laboratory setting rather than in the field, with very little emphasis on documenting links between media violence and actual engagement in

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