Violence is prevalent in the media. In fact, it occurs so often that people have begun to care less and less about it. This is demonstrated by Robert Jay Lifton, who formulated the term “psychic numbing.” Psychic numbing refers to the inability to appreciate the losses of life as they increase. This is essentially saying that when the person’s frequency of losses increased, the less of an emotional reaction they had. In a sense, this relates to Laura Stockdale’s presentation of her and her colleagues' study in that when people are constantly exposed to violence, they become desensitized. This desensitization is also seen in Helen Vossen and her colleagues’ study, but they tested to find out whether it is media violence exposure that negatively influences desensitization or desensitization that negatively influences desensitization. They also addressed desensitization by testing for empathy and sympathy.
In the article “Emotionally anesthetized: Media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing,” Stockdale and colleagues suggest that exposure to media violence causes a decrease in empathy and prosocial behavior. They argue that the changes in emotional face processing after being exposed to media violence can result in desensitization to other’s emotional states. In order to test this, participants watched a nonviolent or violent film clip and then completed an implicit attention-to-emotion task. The researchers found that there was a decrease in frontal central P300 amplitude regardless of the emotion they saw. This suggests that the participants who watched the violent film clip were in less need of cognitive resources to process the emotions they observed, and to inhibit their own behavior in response.Thus, the researchers’ hypothesis was confirmed: exposure to media violence led to desensitization and a decrease in emotional face processing; therefore proposing that less cognitive resources are required for behavior to be hindered.
Empathy plays a critical role in moral development and is considered negatively linked to aggression. Although many studies have found a negative relationship between media violence and empathy, Helen Vossen and colleagues are concerned that these studies frequently treat empathy as a one-dimensional construct as well as mistake empathy for sympathy. In designing their own longitudinal study, they address these issues by considering empathy as a multidimensional construct; measuring for affective empathy, cognitive empathy and sympathy. They define affective empathy as the sharing of another’s emotions and cognitive empathy as understanding another’s emotions based on using one’s own representations of those emotions. On the contrary, sympathy is defined as the feelings of concern one has about distressing events in another’s life. In the study, the participants were adolescents, who filled out two questionnaires a year apart, asking of their violent media exposure, nonviolent media exposure as well as sympathy and empathy. Vossen and colleagues hypothesize that adolescents’ exposure to violent media has a negative longitudinal effect on affective and cognitive empathy. They also hypothesize that affective and cognitive empathy have a negative longitudinal effect on the adolescents’ media violence exposure. In their results, they found that media violence was negatively correlated with affective empathy, cognitive empathy and sympathy. They also found that boys were significantly more exposed to media violence than girls, showing that girls had higher levels of all three categories at both time points. Out of all of their hypotheses, they only accepted that exposure to violent media had a negative longitudinal effect on sympathy. This means that media violence exposure influences sympathy, not empathy. As in Stockdale and her colleagues’ study, this study confirms that media violence causes people to become desensitized, specifically adolescents.
These studies were similar in that they both demonstrated that there is an association between media violence exposure and desensitization. Specifically in the study that Stockdale presented on, it was confirmed that exposure to media violence led to desensitization and a decrease in emotional face processing. Thinking about it, this makes complete sense. We as humans are not sentimental to every single violent act we hear about. The more violence one is exposed to, the less sensitive they are to it, meaning they have less of an emotional reaction. This is explained by the phrase “neurons that fire together wire together,” each time a behavior is repeated, our brains learn to trigger the same neurons each time. influences one’s sympathy. So, these studies connect in that they demonstrate how exposure to media violence changes our brain function and behavior.
Stockdale, L. A., Morrison, R. G., Kmiecik, M. J., Garbarino, J., & Silton, R. L. (2015). Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10(10), 1373–1382. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsv025
Vossen, H. G. M., Piotrowski, J. T., & Valkenburg, P. M. (2016). The Longitudinal Relationship Between Media Violence and Empathy: Was It Sympathy All Along? Media Psychology, 20(2), 175–193. doi: 10.1080/15213269.2015.1121825
Slovic, P. (2007, November). Psychic Numbing and Genocide. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2007/11/slovic
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