Violence In The Media

In recent years, we have seen a staggering amount of mass shootings and other such acts of violence, and many believe that it stems from the amount of violence portrayed in media. Media in this definition could mean the news, books, movies, television shows, or video games. In an article from the Psychiatric Times, Dr. Emanuel Tanay, retired clinical professor of Psychiatry at Wayne State and 50+ year veteran of forensic psychiatry, says, “Violence in the media has been increasing and reaching proportions that are dangerous.” He then tells how violence is everywhere, in television and movies, and reality is distorted this way and if someone lives in a fictional world, then the fictional world is reality. This article goes on to say that while

The paper discusses the initiative, characteristics of attacks, their findings, the implications of the initiative, and how threat assessment is a promising strategy for violence prevention (pg. 8). On page 27, the paper discusses that 59% of the attackers had an interest in violence; be it books, movies, video games, or other media. While over half of the attackers demonstrated an interest in violent media, is the media what caused them to commit these

In one study by the University of Texas Health Science Center, researchers found an increase in depressive symptoms from students who played violent videogames daily vs those who don’t in a cross-sectional observation of 5,147 fifth-grade students. This may seem like an irrelevant fact, on the other hand in the Safe School Initiative paper, on page 27, it profiled potential attackers as having depressive symptoms, and while there are other factors at play, this is a fact to remember. Back to the matter at hand, there was another study done by the Department of Psychology at Iowa State that studied the effects of violent videogames on people of eastern and western countries, by using cross-cultural comparisons, longitudinal studies, statistical controls, and multiple moderators, the study’s “evidence strongly suggests that exposure to violent video games is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, and aggressive affect and for decreased empathy and prosocial behavior.” The point of this study was to see if different cultures have different reactions to videogames, yet by this evidence we see that humans in general are susceptible to advanced aggression with videogames. While it seems that the consensus is that videogames help to cause aggressive tendencies, there is one study from Texas A&M International that begs to