Does Viewing Television Increase Aggression?

TV Violence Affects Minds of People

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Abstract Television violence is pure evil to the minds of children and young adults. A simple cartoon can probably have around thirty violent acts in it. A sit-com show can influence a kid to kill someone. Magazines and newspapers have articles of children imitating violent acts that they have seen on television. Psychologists and doctors have done a lot research to prove that television violence can affect a mind of a child or a young adult. Scientists did weird and educated experiments to show that television violence can affect minds of children and young adults. Parents had discovered ways to prevent television violence from entering their homes. Parents also found way to let their children understand the violence is not real. Parents try to stop the television violence but they can't stop it. Television Violence Harry comes home from work and turns on the television and sees a person's head explode, and someone's heart being ripped out of his chest. Then Harry changes the channel and watches a woman being raped and then killed. Harry looks at what his kids are watching, and he sees that they are watching a cartoon showing a rabbit hitting a duck with a hammer, and the children are trying to imitate the cartoon characters. Such an imitation is often acted out without any thought. Can children and young adult minds be brainwash from careless television violence? The answer to the question is yes. Television violence affects the minds of children and young adults. What is violence? Is violence when somebody pushes a person, or a person hits somebody with a weapon? Can violence take place when something is not purposely being destroyed? The Webster Dictionary defines violence as exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse, or an injury by or as if by distortion, infringement, or profanation. Does television has violence or any characteristics of violence? Yes, a lot of cartoons and sit-coms show acts of violence to capture a child's or a young adult's attention. The people who write television shows believe that there audience, especially young adults, can be blunt to the violence, also the audience can see the pain and suffering is fake. That is a good assumption, but the writers should also believe that their audience could tell the difference between reality violence to television violence. There are to many sit-coms and cartoons that show extreme violence that a person, child or a young adult, will love to perform. Sit-coms show violent acts like fighting, usage of firearms or any kind of weapon, and destruction of property. The popular shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Malcolm in the Middle, and Dark Angel show acts of violence. These shows perform the violent acts: stabbing a person with a stake, stinking a knife in a person stomach, constant fighting between family members, profanity, and someone beating a person to death. Can a violent show cause a child or a young adult to perform violent acts? Yes, the magazine known as Stuff reported an incident that happen in San Francisco. Four teenagers raped a nine-year-old Olivia Niemi and her seven-year-old friend. The teenagers said that Born Innocent, a mini series about a girl reform school, gave them the idea. Court TV, a cable channel, did report on November 23, 2000 on how W.W.F encourage violence in children and young adults. W.W.F (World Wrestling Federation), big sit-com or one can say a soap opera for males, had a lot of evidence that Court TV found about children and young adults performing violent acts that were perform on W.W.F. A nine-year-old boy preformed a close line (a wrestling move where a person takes his or her arm and rams to his or her opponents' neck) a three-year-old boy and cause serious damage to the neck of three year old. Also, a twelve year old preformed a power bomb (a wrestling move where a person his lifted in the air then slam on to the ground) his two-year-old cousin that cause the two year old's death. Cartoons show a lot of violence to capture children and young adults attention. Cartoons are the most violent programs on television (Johnson, 1999). Mostly all cartoons have consent fighting between hero and villains. Some cartoons have funny looking character torturing another character. Can violence on cartoons make a kid or a young adult to do some kind of violent act? Yes, in Ohio a five year-old boy set his house on fire that killed his little sister. The boy said he developed the idea by watching the cartoon Beavis and Butthead (Josephson, 1995). Other example of a child performing a violent act was a six year-old Jeremy Nezworski imitated an act of hanging himself like a ghost after he watch the act on the cartoon The Scooby Doo Show, and the boy killed himself (Josephson, 1995). Doctors, scientists, psychologists, and people that have too much time on his or her hands had done research on how much violence is seen on television. In George Gerbner, a scientist, research found the levels of violence seen during prime-time television have averaged nearly about five acts per hour. What makes it worst is that a Saturday morning TV shows had an average of twenty to twenty five violent acts per hour (Murray, 1994). A survey on television violence reported six hundred and nine violent acts during the time periods of 2pm to 5pm (Murray, 1999). In addition, the National Television Violence Study did some research and found that children's programs show five percent of bad consequences of violence and show sixty seven percent of comedy violence ("Movies", 2000). Psychologists, researchers, and doctors have done a lot of research on how children and young adults minds are affected by television violence. Many researchers agree that violence shown by the media has led an increase in violence and crime, and they also believe that the younger viewer will have a problem in deciding what is non-fiction and fiction. In addition, the lower part of the human brain can't determine images that are real or created on television. The researchers also agree about how people who watch aggressive shows become more aggressive and behaving like a violent criminals (Johnson 1999). John Murray said several studies have show that one exposure to a violent cartoon leads to increase aggression." Most psychologists agree if someone is exposed to violent images on television, that person is more likely to behave violently (Murray, 1994). Patricia Peterson said, "Three thousand studies have been done since 1955 on the link between television and violence; 2,980 of them found a correlation between the two." Summaries and researches are good information to have but where is the true evidence of television violence affects minds of children and young adults. Scientists