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Abstract
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VioLit summary:
OBJECTIVE:
The purpose of this study by Lˆvaas was to examine the effect of exposure to symbolic aggression on the play behavior of children. The author hypothesized that exposure to aggression would produce aggressive play behavior.
METHODOLOGY:
Experimental design was used for this study. Three experiments were done. The first experiment was conducted in the Gatzert Institute of Child Development at the University of Washington. Twelve children from the Institute's nursery school were used as subjects. The subjects were above average in intelligence and came from families with fathers in occupations above the means of the general population. They were randomly selected and matched by gender into two groups of six and were observed for three trials spaced about four days apart. Each subject was accompanied to a playroom by an assistant who invited the subject to "play some games and look at a movie." The assistant then showed the subject how to operate the dependent measure, a set of dolls that hit each other when a bar was depressed. Then the assistant showed the subject how to operate the movie (the movies were set up to stop at ten second intervals, and only continued when the subject pressed a bar - this insured continued interest in the movie). Subjects were shown one of two films on a 9 by 12 inch screen. The aggressive film was cut to give an almost continual display of aggression inflicted by one figure upon another. The nonaggressive film depicted three bear cubs and a mommy bear engaging in pleasant humanlike play. Running time was five minutes for both films. The subjects were then told to play some more with the dolls (dependent measure), and the number of times the bar was depressed was counted via an electronic counter. This was a two minute period of continuous reinforcement where a doll hit the other one every time the bar was pressed. The second and third trials were identical to the first with two exceptions. First, the operant period was eliminated. Second, doll play was immediately followed by a one-minute extinction period. One subject from each group refused to return for the third trial.
The second experiment used 20 children from 4-6 years of age. These children were chosen from low income families with working mothers. Subjects were randomly matched by age and sex into two groups of ten. The experiment was conducted in a trailer. The same independent stimuli and dependent measures were employed, and the procedure was exactly the same as the first experiment, except that a 4 minute extinction period followed the 2 minute continual reinforcement period. The third experiment used the same subjects from experiment 2 with conditions reversed (the group who had seen the aggressive film now saw the nonaggressive film). The experimental model was modified to minimize the "interfering effect of following instructions." During the dependent measure, another toy was placed next to the dolls. This toy was activated the same way that the dolls were (by pressing a lever), only instead of producing an aggressive effect, it simply sent a ball to the top of a cage. The boxes were placed side by side so that subjects could use play with both toys simultaneously if desired. The procedure was identical except that subjects were told they could play with either toy after viewing the film. ANOVA was used to analyze the data.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
In the first experiment there were no significant differences between the mean number of responses on the dolls after seeing the films. Despite the increase in sample size in experiment number two, none of the differences on play response between the groups were significant. There was a significant interaction between the kind of toy played with and the kind of film preceding the toys in experiment three. The children who watched the aggressive films played with the hitting dolls more than the nonaggressive group (p<.06). ANOVA revealed two sources of variation that were significant. One was between the toys; the other was in the interaction between the toys and films. The author concluded that this study provided evidence for an increase in responding to aggressive reinforcing stimuli as a function of exposure to symbolic aggression.
EVALUATION:
This article presents more support for the media-violence argument and, with the focus being on very young children in this study, the very young ages at which children may be affected by violent behavior. With any experiment, artificiality, narrow pool for sample subjects, and relatively small numbers of subjects may cast some validity concerns on these findings. The researcher did try to cope with possible confounding effects of verbal instructions and, thus, tried to maintain methodological integrity. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
N1 - Call Number: F-364, AB-364
KW - Washington
KW - Media Violence Effects
KW - Television Viewing
KW - Television Violence
KW - Early Childhood
KW - Child Aggression
KW - Aggression Causes
KW - Program-Film Content
Language: en |