14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a new scientific study, it would appear that a wide array of negative behaviors can contribute to changing a person's mindset towards aggression. The investigation was conducted by experts at the Iowa State University (ISU).
Details of the work were published in a recent issue of the journal Aggressive Behavior, by a team led by scientist Douglas Gentile, PhD. He explains that the study set out from past discoveries, which showed that media exposure to violence and mean behaviors leads to increased aggression.
What investigators determined was that a similar effect could also be obtained when individuals are exposed to onscreen gossip and emotional bullying, among other behaviors. Social exclusion can also create the same effect.
Exposures to such behaviors activates the portion of the human brain that holds the neural networks which encode aggressiveness and aggressive behaviors. The correlation holds true in both adults and children, PsychCentral reports.
The study was carried out on 250 young women, all of which were recruited from college. Each participant was then asked to look at one of three short clips. The videos showed physical aggression, relational aggression, and a scary scene, respectively.
“What this study shows is that relational aggression actually can cause a change in the way you think. And that matters because of course, how you think can change your behavior,” Gentile explains.
The video clip depicting relational aggression portrayed young women doing their best to steal other women's boyfriends, spreading malicious lies out of the desire to harm another, or simply kicking someone out of their social circles.
After measuring physiological arousal levels in order to ensure that all three videos had the same effect, researchers asked participants to look at a computer screen, while aggressive and neutral words flash on and off at high speed. The goal was to measure how quick test subjects' brain reacted to these words.
“Past research has shown that viewing physical violence on TV activates aggressive scripts in the brain, but our findings suggest that watching both onscreen physical or relational aggression activates those cognitive scripts,” experts write in their journal entry.
“Viewers don’t simply choose to imitate TV characters or make a conscious decision to engage in aggressive behavior. Aggressive reactions are more automatic and less conscious than most people assume,” they conclude.