- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Teen-agers
who watch more than an hour of television a day are much more likely to
become violent than the rare adolescent who watches less, researchers reported
on Thursday.
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- One of the most definitive studies yet to link watching
television with violent behavior finds both men and women are affected
by violent programs on television -- but teen-aged boys are especially
at risk.
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- "We saw the jump was between less than one hour
and more than one hour a day. There was a four-fold increase," Jeffrey
Johnson of Columbia University in New York, who led the study, said in
a telephone interview.
-
- His advice: "Parents should try not to let children
watch more than one hour a day on the average."
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- Johnson, a psychiatric epidemiologist who studies patterns
of behavior, said 60 percent of TV programming contained violence.
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- An average hour of television portrays three to five
violent acts, the American Psychological Association says.
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- Johnson's team tracked 707 children, most of them white
and Catholic, who took part in a study in upstate New York.
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- The children, aged between 1 and 10 when the 17-year
study started, were interviewed several times. The researchers also checked
state and federal arrest records.
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- WATCHING FOR THE WRONG REASONS
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- The link between watching television and behaving violently
was clear even after the researchers accounted for other factors such as
childhood neglect, low family income, or a psychiatric disorder during
adolescence.
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- Researchers said that in some families these factors
did in fact lead to more television watching.
-
- "Childhood neglect, growing up in an unsafe neighborhood,
low family income, low parental education, and psychiatric disorders were
significantly associated with time spent watching television at mean age
14 and with aggressive behavior reported at mean age 16 or 22," they
wrote.
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- The study, published in Friday's issue of the journal
Science, found that 5.7 percent of the adolescents who watched less than
one hour of television committed aggressive acts against other people in
later years, as compared to 22.5 percent of those who watched between one
and three hours a day.
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- And 28.8 percent of those who watched three or more hours
of television daily committed aggressive acts. Broken down by sex, this
equaled 45 percent of males and 12.7 percent of females.
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- Violent acts by males included assault and fighting that
led to injuries, while violent behavior by young women included robbery
and threats to injure someone.
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- Johnson said several mechanisms are at work. "One
of the most important one is the tendency to imitate behavior that people
see on TV," he said.
-
- "We are social beings and we tend to want to try
out things that we see other people doing, especially if we see the person
rewarded for what they did or portrayed as a hero for it."
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- Johnson said many studies had shown that people simply
become inured to violence when they see a lot of it -- either in real life
or on television.
-
- "It has been shown that viewing media violence leads
to a desensitization effect," he said. "The more violence that
they see, the less negative, the more normal, it seems to them."
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- Perhaps people who watch lots of television lose their
social skills, Johnson said, or never develop them.
-
- "So when they get into a conflict with somebody
else, whether it is road rage, whatever the situation might be ... they
may not be able to work their way out of it gracefully. They may resort
to something like verbal aggression and they may even start throwing verbal
punches because they don't know what else to do," he said.
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-
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-
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- Comment
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- Greg Boone
Evolbaby@aol.com 3-31-2
-
- Jeff,
-
- This Reuters article on the psychiatric study relating
television watching and violent behavior is the biggest crock of walrus
waffles I've read yet. How in the heck is television programming going
to be responsible for violent behavior? Oh, lemme guess, because some psychiatrist
said so?
-
- Television is about as responsible for violent behavior
as I am for what color dress the Queen of Spain is going to wear at the
next bull fight.
-
- If television were so much a factor in violent behavior
all I wanna know is what shows did Hitler, Stalin, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan,
Mussolini and Alexander the Great watch? I don't recall any historical
text on how Adolph and his pals sat around the tv set quaffing brews and
chowin' chips and goggling the latest WWF show.
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- The issue here isn't television, the issue here is why
we humans imitate. Sorry, but it's way too out there.
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- Greg
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