When considering whether media violence can harm children, it’s important to understand how the brain works in general, how we learn and what kind of impact media images have on all our minds.

As any psychologist working in the areas of anxiety and stress will tell you, our minds do not differentiate between pictures we see with our eyes and pictures we conjure up using our imagination. In fact, in addressing anxiety disorders, behaviour modification exercises are commonly used, with patients encouraged to picture themselves in highly anxious situations then imagine they’re not experiencing stress or visualise a better, preferred outcome.

Over time, and after repeating these exercises regularly, it’s possible for most people to reduce anxiety and stress. This works because the brain accepts the ‘imagined’ pictures of easing stress to be real -- as real as if the brain saw these pictures through the eyes. As a consequence, the brain begins to believe the person is no longer anxious, in whatever circumstance was visualised, so when similar situations arise in real life, the person retains this memory and feels less anxious.

What these types of therapies show us is that all kinds of images can affect our minds, not just the reality we see in the world around us and not just the things we imagine in our minds, but also the images we see on TV, at the movies and on video/computers game screens.

In adults, what we see around us has less impact on our minds because our brains are fully developed, with a wealth of information and life experience to draw upon.
But in children, the images they see quite literally shape their brain, their attitudes, their beliefs, their lifestyles and eventually their entire being. Their brains are in the process of becoming fully formed and it is the conglomerate of life experiences and learning they undergo, including what they view in the media, that will determine the final structure of their brain.

All the behaviour learned by children comes from a variety of sources and is ‘filed’ in the mind as a series of ‘mental scripts’. These scripts govern the actions we take in life, from knowing how to eat with a knife and fork to deciding what to do on a Saturday afternoon and how to react in a crisis. It’s the very reason fire drills are practised in schools, so that children and teachers, will follow a predetermined mental script that tells them to exit the building quickly and without panic. Practising the drill reinforces the script so well that, when a real fire occurs, most people evacuate safely and, almost, instinctively.

These scripts governing behavioural patterns are recalled by our brains when the need arises to decide on an appropriate course of action. This process mostly leads to constructive actions but can also play out negative behaviour. For example, if someone points a gun at you, one person might respond by attacking the gunman while another may run for their life. It’s the scripts in their minds that give each person the idea of how to respond; subconsciously the script governs whatever split-second decision is made.

When violent images are repeatedly viewed, the brain also creates ‘scripts’, or behavioural patterns, based on this information. These ‘violent’ scripts may influence a person to respond aggressively to a situation, particularly one that resembles, say, a scene from a violent movie or a course of action in a violent video game that had a positive outcome.

However, in real life, these reactions can lead to fatal consequences.

That said, it’s worth bearing in mind that not all violence is ‘bad’ for children. For example, violence that shows the emotional and physical costs of actions, where characters in films suffer, cry and regret partaking in violence, actually teaches important lessons to our children – it teaches them that violence is bad and to be avoided.

However, other portrayals of violence can be destructive and dangerous to our children and our society and, sadly, this is the kind of violence that is most commonly shown in our media.

Specifically, when violence appears to be fun, with the hero making wise cracks and laughing while shooting and killing a multitude of characters, where the filmmaker ignores the sad consequences to those killed by quickly moving on to other action scenes – this type of media violence can be very harmful.

What this teaches children is that violence is not only a good thing but also a fun thing to do and a great way to resolve conflicts and at least some of the children who grow up on a diet of ‘bad’ violence will come to rely on aggressive behaviour in later life.

If this isn’t disturbing enough, researchers also believe violence affects the structure of the developing brain -- something parents need to know more about because the brains of violent people do differ from those of non-violent people.

Some experts in the area of child development are very concerned about this issue because a child’s brain develops differently based on the stimuli it receives. For instance, a child that is not taught language at a young age will have trouble grasping language skills when they get older because their brain will not fully develop the areas needed for language skills.

By the same token, a child who watches large amounts of violence will develop more fully the part of their brain that deals with violence and aggression because that’s the part of their brain receiving the most stimuli, often at the cost of higher brain functions such as language and reasoning skills, which are not developing at the same rate due to a lack of exposure to appropriate stimuli (such as reading).

In other words, children who watch a lot of violence growing up will quite literally be ‘wired’ differently to those who watch less violence. Their brains will retain a kind of instinctual nature to them, responding to situations with the animal instincts of ‘fight or flight’, rather than reasoning their way out of a difficult situation.

In the future, violent criminals may exhibit even less empathy or mercy towards their victims than we currently see today, in part because their brains may never fully develop the areas responsible for such emotions.

While much of the research into violent media has concentrated on television and films, a new area of debate has opened up with the proliferation of computer games (sometimes played on TVs, using play stations, or in arcades). These games are discussed in more detail in Section 4: Interactive Media, but as the overview on computer games research below shows, this is an area of violent media that needs urgent consideration.

Studies into computer game violence have had some mixed results and, since children are subject to many influences in their lives, it’s not always possible to isolate one specific factor from their overall development and draw an accurate conclusion on the effects of that factor in isolation. However, the current research, much of which stems from the US, is still relevant and deserves consideration.

Basically, four main outcomes have been documented so far.

The first is that children who play violent video games are more likely to be aggressive and violent towards others compared with children who don’t play these games. A number of studies looking into this have typically compared 5- to 8-year-olds who played aggressive-content video games with those playing games without aggressive content. The findings conclude children playing aggressive games are more likely to imitate that behaviour and be more aggressive in real life.

The second outcome of the current research suggests that levels of aggression exhibited by youngsters appear to increase proportional to the amount of time spent playing violent interactive games. In other words, the more children play them, the more aggressive they appear to become.

One such study, funded by the National Institute on Media and the Family (US), comparing the level of physical fights engaged in by 600 students, aged 8 to 10, assessed to have hostile personalities but with differing levels of game usage. They found the students with high usage rates for violent video games were more likely to have physical fights (63 per cent) than those with low usage rate (28 per cent).

The third outcome, and possibly one of the most disturbing issues, concerns the developing brain and suggests computer game play may result in the underdevelopment of areas controlling aggressive behaviour, making it more difficult for users to control their aggression.

A better understanding of this can be found in results from a pivotal Japanese study, conducted by Professor Ryuta Kawashima, of the Tohoku University. Measuring the brain activity of hundreds of teenagers as they played a Nintendo game and comparing that to another group doing simple arithmetic, Kawashima’s team found decreased stimulation of the brain’s frontal lobe in the computer game players.

This is significant because the frontal lobe plays an important role in repressing antisocial impulses as well as being associated with memory, learning and emotion. In children, less stimulation to this part of the developing brain prevents certain neurons from thickening and connecting properly, impairing the brain’s ability to control violent or aggressive impulses. The more highly stimulated the frontal lobe is, the greater the ability to keep such urges under check.

Kawashima concluded that the greatest threat from computer games was not their tendency to arouse aggression but the lack of mental stimulation they provided.

“The importance of this discovery cannot be underestimated,” he told a British learning conference in August 2001. “There is a problem we will have with a new generation of children who play computer games that we have never seen before. The implications are very serious for an increasingly violent society.”

Lastly, the fourth main outcome of the current research deals with the ideas and mental scripts that violent computer games create in the minds of users, particularly in children.

In 2000, Professor Craig Anderson, Chair of the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University, undertook a meta-analysis of the current scientific literature available on the effects of violent computer games, reviewing all the studies previously undertaken. After compiling a detailed analysis, he concluded ‘that exposure to violent video games poses a public health threat to children and youth, including college age individuals.’

The combined research indicates exposure to violent computer games raises levels of aggression in young adults and children, both males and females, as well as reducing pro-social behaviour. Moreover, Anderson found a positively relationship between video game exposure and the ‘main mechanism underlying long term effects on the development of aggressive personality — aggressive cognition’.

In many ways, this research echoes the results of the multitude of research on the effects of television and movie violence. The implication is that violent computer games affect children similarly to other violent media, though perhaps more profoundly because of the amount of repetition involved and the interactive nature of these games, where players are active participants creating the carnage that occurs, rather than watching it passively like a TV show.

More research into computer games may be needed to convince parents and users that violent interactive games are anything but safe and healthy toys suitable for children. However, the level of undeniable evidence required to convince manufacturers to turn their backs on a very profitable market may come too late to stop the ongoing corruption of children currently enamoured with this form of violent entertainment.

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