How Violent Media Encourages The Behavior Of Adolescents

In present day society, the realm of intense and violent video games along with their media counterparts is ever changing, and this transformation is leading to the most expressive and realistic viciousness a child can be exposed to without actually harming another human being. Furthermore, due to this tremendous level of ‘realisticness,’ the inquiry of whether or not the violence portrayed in these video games and television shows leads to an amplified level of aggression and other types of violent behavior in their participants and viewers has become a forerunner among both psychological and parenting authorities. The purpose of this paper is to give an honest assessment of the various studies performed on this topic, as well as to†¦show more content†¦If those statistics are not enough to stimulate your curiosity of the effects of such media outlets, consider that, on average, children between the ages of eight and eighteen spend over forty hours of their t ime in one week under the influence of media (Anderson and Bushman, 2001). Now, if the youthful generation is so consumed in the realm of video games and media, would you not want to understand the effects, positive or negative, it is having on them? Much of the research today tends to draw the same conclusion: by participating in violent media outlets, children will display short-term effects of heightened aggression. In an article produced by Steven Silvern and Peter Williamson (1987), the concept of the general arousal theory, which states that children who become stimulated will more than likely act in a fashion similar to the one they most recently observed, is discussed. This editorial also attempts to tie in the social learning theory as another possible candidate for the increase in violent behavior among children who partake in video games that are fierce in nature. For clarification purposes, the social learning theory states that the act of learning can transpire in a social environment, as well as through surveillance or direct coaching (Sincero, 2011). Silvern and