Harmful Effects of Violence in Media on Young People

The article that I was looking at is from an American Psychological Association website. In this article Psychologists study potential harmful effects of violence in media on young people. According to this article in 1982 the national Institute of mental Health point out the main effects of watching violence in media. They claimed that; children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, they become more fearful of the world around them and they might be more likely to show aggressive or harmful ways toward others. It clearly tells us that seeing violence on media does effect younger generation, even though it might not be clear to see as the negative side effects of watching violence in tv doesn’t always have to manifest just in aggressive form of behavior and it definitely has a big impact on us, even if we might not be fully aware of it. For example, watching violence in media might not affect our social behavior like aggression toward others, but by getting us used to the violence and the view of blood we might more easily commit crimes us our morality or our natural instinct of fear would be damaged.

Another, important research from this article it’s a research taken by psychologists L. Rowell Huesmann, Leonard Eron in the 1980s. This researched showed that children from elementary who tend to watch many violent programs in TV, were more likely to show any sights of aggression when they became teenagers. It tells us that children who were exposed to violence in media during their childhood were more likely to copy these aggressive behaviors in their future.

The proofs of it are the participants of this experiment. Huesmann and Eron “found that the ones who’d watched a lot of TV violence when they were 8 years old were more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for criminal acts as adults”. However, later research by psychologists Douglas Gentile and Brad Bushman, suggested that exposure to media violence might be just one of many factors that can cause aggressive behavior. Other research has found that exposure to media violence can desensitize people to violence in the real world and that, for some people, watching violence in the media becomes enjoyable and does not result in the anxious arousal that would be expected from seeing such imagery.