Does watching television cause violence?

Introduction

Children of different ages watch and understand television in distinct ways, counting on the extent of their attention spans, the ways in which they process information, the amount of mental effort they invest, and their own life experiences. These variables must all be examined to gain an understanding of how television aggression affects them. Infants can pay attention to an operating television set for short periods of time, but the attention demands a great effort and infants are usually more interested in their own activities. Even when they manage pay attention to the television, infants probable miss most of what adults consider to be program content. They experience it primarily as fragmented displays of lightweight and sound, which they are only intermittently able to assembly into meaningful combinations such as recognizable human or animal characters.

Discussion

Children do not become full-fledged "viewers" until around the age of two-and-a-half. As toddlers, they start to pay more attention to the television set when it is on, and they evolve a restricted ability to extract meaning from television content. They are probable to imitate what they see and hear on television.

The examining patterns children establish as toddlers will leverage their examining habits all through their lives. Since toddlers have a strong fondness for cartoons and other programs that have characters that proceed fast, there is considerable prospect that they will be exposed to large amounts of violence.

At the preschool age (three to five years old), children start watching television with an "exploration" approach. They actively search for meaning in the content, but are still especially attracted to vivid output features, such as rapid character action, rapid changes of scene, and intense or unforeseen sights and sounds.

Because television aggression is accompanied by vivid output features, preschoolers are predisposed to seek out and pay attention to violence—particularly cartoon violence. It is not the aggression itself that makes the cartoons attractive to preschoolers, but the accompanying vivid output features. With this fondness for cartoons, preschoolers are being exposed to a large number of brutal acts in their examining day. Moreover, they are improbable to be able to put the aggression in context, since they are probable to miss any subtlety expressed mitigating information in relative to motivation and consequences. Preschoolers behave more aggressively than usual in their play after watching any high-action stimulating television content, but especially after watching brutal television.

Elementary school age is considered ...