14 DAY TRIAL // Iowa State University (ISU) experts say that media violence, such as seen on TV, the Internet, some video games, and so on, is not the main driver to aggression in children, teens and young adults. The team acknowledges that it plays a role, but not a determining one, as other studies suggested.
As most people already know, the debate as to whether or not media violence can be blamed for the violent fits of children and teens has been raging on among parents, politicians and scientists for a long time. There are plenty of studies to support both of the two main points of view.
What the ISU team established is that media violence is part of a group of six factors that can be used to predict future aggression. The group also include bias toward hostility, low parental involvement, gender, physical victimization, and prior physical fights.
The research group, led by associate professor of psychology Douglas Gentile, says that the presence of several of these factors in a particular individual makes that someone more likely to become aggressive towards other later on, PsychCentral reports.
Gentile, who is also the leader of the ISU Media Research Lab, says that the risk of becoming aggressive towards other grows extremely fast if even one extra factor is added, over what already exists. These results should also give parents something to be happy about.
According to the team leader, exposure to media violence is the easiest for parents to control. At the same time, exerting such control would imply parental implication, so two of the risk factors would be checked off the list in one fell swoop.
“Having one or two risk factors is no big deal. Kids are resilient – they can handle it. You get to three and there’s a big jump. When you get out past four risk factors, risk is increasing at a much higher rate than you would expect,” Gentile explains.
“If we are concerned about bullying in schools, then this approach has real world implications for helping to target the kids who are at higher risk for bullying behavior so we could use our limited resources more effectively to reduce bullying in schools,” he goes on to say.
According to the ISU group, the new research was carried out on 430 children from schools in Minnesota, aged between 7 and 11. Their teachers were also surveyed twice yearly.
Details of the new investigation appear in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture.