Violence and Media
Psychological Effects of War and Violence on Children.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 281–301
Snyder H N, Sickmund M Ju
enile Offender and Victims: A
National Report. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, Washington, DC
Perry B D, Pollard R A, Blakley T L, Baker W L, Vigilante D
1995 Childhood trauma, the neurobiology of adaptation, and
‘‘use-dependent’’ development of the brain: How ‘‘states’’
become ‘‘traits’’. Infant Mental Health Journal 16(4): 271–91
Richters J E, Martinez P 1993 The NIMH Community Violence
Project: I. Children as victims of and witnesses to violence.
Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 56(1): 7–21
Sameroff A, Seifer R, Barocas R, Zax M 1987 Intelligence
Quotient scores of 4-year-old children: Social environment
risk factors. Pediatrics 79: 343–50
Shepherd R 1997 Ju
enile Justice Update. Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Washington, DC
Snyder H N, Sickmund M 1999 Ju
enile Offenders and Victims:
1999 National Report. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delin-
quency Prevention, Washington, DC
Taylor L, Zuckerman B, Harik V, Groves B M 1994 Witnessing
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ioral Pediatrics 15(2): 120–23
Tolan P H 1996 How resilient is the concept of resilience?
Community Psychologist 29(4): 12–15
J. Garbarino
Violence and Media
Public and academic concern about media’s con-
tribution to real world violence are about as old as the
mass media and the social sciences themselves
(Wartella and Reeves 1985). Despite frequent framing
of the matter as ‘controversial,’ extensive research—an
estimated 3,000 (Donnerstein et al. 1994) to 3,500
(Wartella et al. 1998) studies in the United States
alone—have examined the impact of media violence,
and a number of recent major reviews (Huston et al.
1992, Murray 1994, see also Potter 1999, Paik and
Comstock 1994, Comstock and Paik 1991), have
concluded that media violence plays a measurable role
in real-world violence. A variety of US agencies,
including the Centers for Disease Control of the US
Public Health Service (1991), and medical and public
interest organizations, including the American Medi-
cal Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics,
and the National Conference of Parent-Teacher As-
sociations, have identified media violence as a public
health problem. The review below focuses most
heavily on US research and US media, most notably
American television, primarily because a large ma-
jority of the published social science research on media
and violence is US research on American audiovisual
media. Potter (1999, pp. 44–5), for example, reports 42
published content analyses of US television since 1954,
and just 19 from the rest of the world. Moreover,
American media are among the world’s most
violent—and most exported—and real-world violence
is a recurring public policy issue. Further, much of this
literature concerns impacts of media violence on
children and adolescents, for the inter-related reasons
that young audiences are considered the most im-
pressionable and most vulnerable. Adults are generally
viewed to be more resistant to the deleterious in-
fluences of violence, and, as some would argue (cf.
Huesmann 1997), violent behaviors in adulthood may
be traced to media use during childhood.
1. Theories of Effect
Three models have been proposed to describe the
process by which such learning and imitation of media
violence occurs: social learning theory, priming effects
theory, and a social developmental model of learning
(Wartella et al. 1998).
First proposed by Albert Bandura in the 1960s,
social learning theory is the best known theoretical
account of violence effects. Bandura asserts that
through observing television models, viewers come to
learn behaviors which are appropriate, that is, which
behaviors will be rewarded and which punished. In
this way, viewers seek to attain rewards and therefore
imitate these media models. When both children and
adults are shown an aggressive model who is either
rewarded or punished for their aggressive behavior,
models who are positively reinforced influence imi-
tation among the viewers. Even research in the field
has demonstrated that aggression is learned at a young
age and becomes more impervious to change as the
child grows older. In a longitudinal study to examine
the long-term effects of television violence on ag-
gression and criminal behavior, Huesmann et al.
(1984) studied a group of youth across 22 years, at ages
8, 18, and 30. For boys (and to a lesser, though still
significant extent for girls), early television violence
viewing correlated with self-reported aggression at age
30 and added significantly to the prediction of serious
criminal arrests accumulated by age 30. These re-
searchers find a longitudinal relationship between
habitual childhood exposure to television violence and
adult crime and suggest that approximately 10 percent
of the variability in later criminal behavior can be
attributed to television violence.
Priming effects theory serves to augment the more
traditional social learning theory account of television
violence effects. In the work of Leonard Berkowitz
and his colleagues, this theoretical account asserts that
many media effects are immediate, transitory, and
short-term (Berkowitz 1984). Berkowitz suggests that
when people watch television violence, it activates or
‘primes’ other semantically related thoughts which
may influence how the person responds to the violence
on television. Viewers who identify with the actors on
television may imagine themselves like that character
carrying out the aggressive actions of the character on
television, and research evidence suggests that ex-
posure to media aggression does indeed ‘prime’ other
16187
Violence and Media
aggressive thoughts, evaluations, and even behaviors
such that violence viewers report a greater willingness
to use violence in interpersonal situations.
Only Rowell Huesmann’s (1986; see also Huesmann
1997) theoretical formulation of the social develop-
mental model of violence effects offers a true reciprocal
theoretical account of how viewers’ interest in media
violence, attention to such violence, and individual
viewer characteristics may interact in a theory of
media violence effects. Using ideas from social cog-
nition theory he develops an elaborate cognitive
mapping or script model. He argues that social
behavior is controlled by ‘programs’ for behavior
which are established during childhood. These ‘pro-
grams’ or ‘scripts’ are stored in memory and are used
as guides to social behavior and problem solving.
Huesmann and Miller (1994, p. 161) submit that ‘a
script suggests what events are to happen in the
environment, how the person should behave in re-
sponse to these events, and what the likely outcome to
those behaviors would be.’ Violence from television is
‘encoded’ in the cognitive map of viewers, and sub-
sequent viewing of television violence helps to main-
tain these aggressive thoughts, ideas, and behaviors.
Over time such continuing attention to television
violence can thus influence people’s attitudes toward
violence and their maintenance and elaboration of
aggressive scripts.
This theory suggests that while viewing violence
may not cause aggressive behavior, it certainly has an
impact on the formation of cognitive scripts for
mapping how to behave in response to a violent event
and what the outcome is most likely to be. Television
portrayals, then, are among the media and personal
sources that provide the text for the script which is
maintained and expanded upon by continued ex-
posure to scripts of violence.
Huesmann has demonstrated that there are key
factors which are particularly important in main-
taining the television viewing–aggression relationship
for children: the child’s intellectual achievement level,
social popularity, identification with television charac-
ters, belief in the realism of the TV violence, and the
amount of fantasizing about aggression. According to
Huesmann, a heavy diet of television violence sets into
motion a sequence of processes, based on these
personal and interpersonal factors, that results in
many viewers becoming not only more aggressive but
also developing increased interest in seeing more
television violence.
It must be emphasized that all serious scholars of
the impacts of media on violence are careful to note
that media are not the only, nor perhaps among the
most important, contributors to real-world violence.
Violent behavior is a complex, multivariable problem,
formed of many influences. Racism, poverty, drug
abuse, child abuse, alcoholism, illiteracy, gangs, guns,
mental illness, a decline in family cohesion, a lack of
deterrents, the failure of positive role models, among
16188
others, all interact to affect antisocial behavior. As
Huesmann has argued, aggression is a syndrome, an
enduring pattern of behavior that can persist through
childhood into adulthood. The impact of media
violence appears strongest as a predictor of real-world
antisocial behavior as one facet of a ‘culture of
violence.’
2. Types of Effects
As Potter (1999, Chap. 9) notes, media-violence effects
fall into five categories—physiological, emotional,
cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral—and both im-
mediate or short- and long-term effects have been
studied. While some attention has focused on direct,
short-term imitative or modeling effects (cf. Phillips
1980, 1982, but see Hessler and Stipp 1985), more
attention and public policy concern has focused on the
long-term impact of repeated exposure to violence.
More generally, three overarching categories of effect
receive most attention: learning of aggression, desensi-
tization to real-world violence, and the cultivation of
fear in repeated exposure to media violence (Wilson et
al. 1997).
Clearly, not all violent depictions should be treated
equally, nor all viewers. The (US) National Television
Violence Study (Wilson et al. 1997) identified several
contextual factors within a representation that may
influence audience reactions to media violence which
include the following.
2.1 The Nature of the Perpetrator
Where individuals perceive perpetrators of violence as
attractive, as heroes, and\or as similar to themselves,
the likelihood of stimulating attention (Bandura 1986)
and aggression (Paik and Comstock 1994) increases.
2.2 The Nature of the Victim
While the commission of violence on an attractive
character with which an audience member identifies
might serve to inhibit aggressive behavior, its principal
impact would seem to be in arousing fear among the
audience members.
2.3 The Reason for the Violence
Wilson et al. (1997, p. 24) note that violence viewed as
justified likely heightens aggression, while violence
viewed as unjustified arouses fear. The impact of
justification has been documented with fictional as
well as realistic programming (Meyer 1972), and with
adult as well as child viewers (Liss et al. 1983). In fact,
a recent meta-analysis of 217 media studies documents

that a justified portrayal of violence can enhance
aggressive behavior among viewers (Paik and
Comstock 1994).
2.4 The Presence of Weapons
A number of studies, including a meta-analysis of 56
published experiments (Carlson et al. 1990) have
demonstrated that the presence of weapons, either
pictorally or in the natural environment, can enhance
aggression among subjects. While, for ethical reasons,
the large majority of such research involves adult
subjects, in at least one study (Frodi 1975) the presence
of weapons enhanced aggression among adolescents.
‘Conventional’ weapons such as guns and knives are
more likely than unconventional means for priming
the effect, social learning theory would suggest, be-
cause their use as a means of aggression are stored in
memory (Berkowitz 1990, Leyens and Parke 1975).
2.5 The Extent and Graphicness of the Violence
A review (Wilson et al. 1997) for the National
Television Violence Study suggested that more re-
search is needed, but several tentative conclusions
about extent and graphicness could be reached: (a)
extensiveness of violence within media presentations
should be associated with increased desensitization to
violence, at least in the short- to medium-term; (b)
graphicness of violence should be associated with
increased cultivation of fear; (c) longitudinal studies
clearly suggest that extensiveness of
iewingviolent
media presentations heightens the likelihood of en-
gaging in aggressive behavior.
2.6 The Degree of Realism of the Violence
In brief, realistic violence has been found to induce
aggressive behavior, and to induce fear, more than
violence believed to be less realistic or more fantastic.
An extremely important qualification deals with
younger children, who may be unable to distinguish
realistic from fantastic characters, behaviors, and
situations. In one study, however, where percei
ed
realism was manipulated for older children (9 to 11 in
Feshbach 1972; 10 to 13 in Atkin 1983), those subjects
who were led to believe that footage was realistic news
were more likely subsequently to behave aggressively
than those led to believe it was taken from an
entertainment program.
2.7 Whether Violence is Rewarded or Punished
Rewarded violence is more likely to be imitated than
violence which is punished. Significantly, and par-
ticularly for children (since, as we will show below,
television programming most frequently presents vi-
olent actions that are neither rewarded nor punished),
the absence of punishment may enhance imitation,
Violence and Media
even in the absence of explicit reward (Bandura 1965,
Walters and Parke 1964). Paik and Comstock’s meta-
analysis (1994) suggests that rewarded violence stimu-
lates aggression among both child and adult audiences.
One study suggests that punishment of criminal
violence decreases fear (Bryant et al. 1981).
2.8 Consequences of Violence
In general (and exceptions are noted in Wilson et al.
1997, p. 30), mediated depictions of violence which
show either pain cues or other short- or longer-term
negative effects or consequences of violence are likely
to depress the learning of aggression. There is little
research on the effects of pain cues or violence
consequences on desensitization and the cultivation of
fear.
2.9 Presence of Humor
As the National TV Violence Study review also noted,
further research is needed here as well, but the present
state of knowledge suggests, other things being equal,
that violence coupled with humor is more likely to
heighten aggression, and to increase desensitization,
than violence without the presence of humor:
Several mechanisms can be used to explain such a facilitative
effect of humor on aggression. Humor might elevate a viewer’s
arousal level over that attained by violence alone, and
increased arousal has been shown to facilitate aggression.
… Humor could serve as a reinforcement or reward for
violence, especially if the perpetrator is funny or admired or
his or her wit. And humor may diminish the seriousness of the
violence and therefore undermine the inhibiting effects of
harm and pain cues in a scene. … However, we should
underscore that our conclusion about the facilitative effect of
humor on aggression is tentative until more systematic
research … is undertaken (Wilson et al. 1997, p. 32).
3. Young Viewers
As noted, research indicates that certain factors may
be processed differently by young viewers. First,
children below about age 8 have more difficulty
distinguishing reality from fantasy and often imitate
superheros with magical powers such as the Power
Rangers (Boyatzis et al. 1995). Second, young children
may have difficulty connecting scenes and drawing
inferences from the plot. Timing of punishments and
rewards becomes important in this instance. In many
programs, the crime or violent behavior may go
unpunished until the end of the program. Young
children may have difficulty connecting the ending
punishment with the initial violent act and may,
therefore, believe that the violence went unpunished
(Wilson et al. 1997). Thus, learning of aggressive
attitudes and behaviors from television varies by both
the nature of the portrayals and the nature of the
16189
Violence and Media
viewers. The presence of contextual factors in the
portrayals which may inhibit young children’s social
learning of aggression decreases the negative conse-
quences of such portrayals and should be encouraged.
Not all violent portrayals are the same and the context
of violence is clearly quite important. Similarly, young
children, those under the age of seven or eight, may be
particularly susceptible to learning from exposure to
television violence because of differences in how they
make sense of television compared to adults.
4. The Media En
ironment
Television’s role as the central mass medium in much
of the world for the past half-century, and its ubiquity
and ability to enter almost every home, often without
parental supervision, has meant that more public and
scholarly concern has focused on its contents than on
any other medium’s, and this concern has accom-
panied its diffusion into every corner of the earth.
Unfortunately, cumulative and comparative re-
search on television’s violent content is hampered by a
lack of consistency in defining violence and especially
defining the population and sampling frame in studies
of television.
The most extensive single content study of US
television was the 1994–7 National Television Violence
Study (National Television Violence Study 1997,
Center for Communication and Social Policy 1997,
1998). Examined were the 6 a.m.–11 p.m. contents of
a multistage probability sample constructed sample
week of programming on 23 network-station, indepen-
dent-station, and basic-cable and premium-cable
channels; thus about 8,000 programs were analyzed
over the 1994–5, 1995–6, and 1996–7 television
‘seasons.’ Certain programs, including ‘hard news,’
religious shows, sporting events, quiz shows, and
educational shows, were sampled but not analyzed.
About three-fifths of the remaining programs con-
tained some visual violence, a figure that like most
summary statistics remained stable over the three
years of the study. In descending order, premium
cable, basic cable, independent-station, broadcast
network station, and public broadcast stations’ pro-
gramming were likely to contain violence. By content
genre, in decreasing order, movies, dramas, children’s
shows, music videos, and reality-based and comedy
programs were likely to contain violence. Violence was
far more prevalent during prime-time than during
daytime hours.
Of signal concern to the NTVS researchers was the
context of televised violence; it was often glamorized
(more than a quarter of all violence was perpetrated by
‘good’ or attractive characters, and some 40 percent by
characters with at least some good qualities); sanitized
(about 7\8 of violent scenes show no blood and gore;
almost half show no harm to victims of violence,
although more than half of violent interactions show
infliction of harm that would be lethal in ‘real life,’ and
16190
about half depict no pain cues in victims of violence);
and unsanctioned (in a majority of scenes, violence
perpetrators were neither rewarded nor punished
[‘punishment’ was considered any noticeable sanction,
including a perpetrator’s oral expression of remorse],
and among other scenes, rewards and punishments
were about equally likely; in three-quarters of cases,
characters perpetrating violence were either never
punished, or were punished only at the program’s
conclusion). Moreover, only three percent of pro-
grams with violence had any antiviolence theme
(Center for Communication and Social Policy 1998,
Chaps. 3–4). Potter (1999) has an extensive discussion
of definitions of media violence and the results of
content analyses from a variety of studies.
5. Media Violence and Public Policy
As noted, the consensus in the social scientific com-
munity regarding media violence is that it serves as a
contributor to aggression in the real world, and
virtually all public opinion surveys confirm that wider
publics believe this as well. Nonetheless, such findings
are ‘controversial’ in the media industries, and among
a minority of academics (see, e.g. Fowles 1999 and
sources cited therein). In the United States in par-
ticular, since the 1950s the media industries—tele-
vision in particular, but also recorded music, motion
pictures, pictorial comic books, and video games—
have responded to public and governmental outcries
against violent content by promises to reform under
self-regulation. Motion pictures, video-games, and
recorded music all list ‘ratings’ for their products
which suggest age-groups for which the industry self-
regulatory groups think the content for these products
is appropriate. The US Telecommunications Act of
1996 mandated that the television networks create a
‘voluntary’ ratings system or face creation of one by
the federal government. The system the broadcast
industry has created suggests appropriate age cate-
gories and levels of sex, language, and violence to
allow consumers and parents to make program
choices. The same act mandated a ‘v-chip’ in newly
manufactured television sets to allow parents to screen
or filter out violent programs. There is to date
insufficient research to indicate whether and what
sorts of parents and other viewers are using either the
ratings or the v-chip technology to screen violence.
However, experimental research by Cantor and her
colleagues (Cantor and Nathanson 1998, Cantor et al.
1997) suggests that young children may use aged-
based ratings systems to shield themselves from violent
content while for older children and adolescents, there
may be a boomerang or ‘forbidden fruit’ effect
whereby ratings attract them to more ‘adult’ violent or
sexually explicit material. In the United States Con-
gress, a moratorium on discussion of television vi-
olence is in effect, pending further information on the
effects of ratings and the v-chip, but the legislature is

focusing its attention on violent video-games, the
target of significant public criticism in the wake of a
number of firearms murders in public schools.
6. Conclusion
It is clear that where children and television violence
are concerned, the question that remains is not
whether media violence has an effect, but rather how
important that effect is in comparison with other
factors in bringing about the current level of crime in
the United States and other industrialized nations.
Future research should also aim to establish who
precisely is most susceptible to media violence, and,
most importantly, what sorts of intervention might
help diminish its influence. At the same time, any
interventions that help establish policies and practices
to reduce the socially inappropriate ways of portraying
violence and increase the socially responsible ways
(such as using violence to assert antiviolence messages)
should be encouraged as well. Long-term solutions to
problems caused by violence in the real world, how-
ever, will require attention to a much wider variety of
causal agents.
See also: Media Effects; Media Effects on Children
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All rights reserved.
Violence as a Problem of Health
In the early 1990s, many policy makers and social
scientists related the problem of community violence
to neighborhoods trapped in struggles among gangs
competing to sell and distribute illegal drugs, especially
cocaine and crack cocaine. From this perspective, the
challenge for communities was to locate and restrain
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
perpetrators and respond to victims. Gradually, it has
been recognized that community violence, however it
began, affects many segments of the population.
Seemingly clear distinctions between victim and per-
petrator seem to have faded. Heightened exposure to
violence is assumed to increase acts of aggression in
anticipation of violence from another. Effectively, the
timing rather than the nature of an act may differ-
entiate victim from victimizer. In such an environment,
the sense of unease may seem constant, the need for
vigilance continuous, and suspicion of others required.
That state may, in turn, disrupt sleep, upset vegetative
functions, impair interpersonal relationships, and
disable effective concentration on work and studies.
Together, these characteristics produce an environ-
ment marked by ‘pervasive community violence’
(PCV), an ecological situation with significant impact
on emotional, behavioral, and psychological health.
PCV, therefore, negatively alters the essence of
community life, broadly disrupts its functioning and
presumably thereby impairs residents’ general health.
The potential for such broad impact must be ap-
preciated and respected before one can enlist com-
munities to join in investigating PCV’s nature and
consequences. Investigators who do not appreciate
that quality may be surprised by the reluctance of
community leaders (e.g., school administrators,
county health officer, and representatives of the
mayor’s office) to participate in its study. The leaders
may deny the problem’s extent or hesitate to make
public the negative quality of their neighborhood or
community. For them genuine partnerships require
time accumulated through historical involvement and
future commitment. History enables disclosure and
trust. Intimate aspects of a community are rarely
shared with strangers. Assurance that the investigator
will be there in the future (even after external funds are
gone) is important, given community leaders’ appreci-
ation of the intransigence of social problems and the
fickleness of social scientists. Thus, from the outset it
must be appreciated that to study and alter the nature
and consequence of PCV requires a genuine and long-
term partnership between communities and social
scientists.
1. Definition of Terms
As one reviews the growing PCV literature, the need
for defining relevant terms becomes apparent. Violence
refers to both acts and consequences of the intentional
use or threat of use of force to cause injury, harm, or
death to another. The qualifier ‘intentional’ excludes
unintended or accidental acts and consequences.
Determining intent represents an as yet unresolved
methodological challenge. For PCV, the consequences
of
iolent acts refer to the rippling health and mental
health effects experienced by: (a) individuals directly
victimized by an act or threat of violence; (b) indivi-
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7