Media violence has been seen to make an impact on the viewers or players of violent video games. These effects can be long term or short term depending on the amount of violent content an individual consumes on a daily basis. One short term effect is priming and arousal. Priming occurs when an external observed stimulus such as a fight scene within a film excites another brain node representing a behavior, emotion or cognition. When media violence primes aggressive concepts then aggression is more likely to follow. A long term effect that occurs is desensitization. The normal reactions that would happen after watching violence involving blood or gore would be an increase in heart rate and discomfort. However, after repeated exposure to media violence the individual becomes desensitized and the negative emotional response decreases as the individual becomes used to the content (Huesmann, Rowell L.) This desensitization can have a lot of negative impact if media violence is prevalent in one’s life.
In her paper “Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing” Laura Stockdale et al. examines some of these short and long term effects to violent media exposure. This paper talks about how media violence exposure causes increased aggression and how this violence leads to desensitization when evaluating other people's emotions. The EEG (electroencephalography) test showed decreased amplitude in event related potentials (ERP) at P200 and N170 which are components of the ERP after watching a violent film. This showed that exposure to the violence within the film led to suppression of implicit emotional processing as well as holistic face processing. This is an issue because individuals who consume a lot of media violence are not able to process facial emotions properly which is a life skill that every individual needs to possess in order to have sympathy for others and be able to properly handle situations in life that require you to understand how an individual is feeling.
Usually aggression related behaviors are suppressed within an individual, however, the brain network responsible for this can become less active with frequent exposure to violence in media. Another article with scientists from Columbia University showed exactly this, the brain network that was responsible for suppressing behaviors such as unwanted or inappropriate aggression became less active in study subjects after they watched clips from violent movies that depicted violence (Brain on Violent Media). This study also showed how media violence can play a part in increased aggression because there was activation in a brain area associated with planning behaviors. This finding shows that the brain is not able to inhibit behavior-related processing when watching violent media. Especially because this finding was not found in individuals who watched non-violent content showing that the violent content was what was causing this effect in the study subjects.
Reference List
Columbia University Medical Center. "This Is Your Brain On Violent Media." ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily, 10 December 2007.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071206093014.htm>.
Huesmann, L Rowell. “The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and
Research.” The Journal of Adolescent Health : Official Publication of the Society for
Adolescent Medicine, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dec. 2007,
Stockdale, Laura A., Robert G. Morrison, Matthew J. Kmiecik, James Garbarino, and
Rebecca L. Silton. "Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes
during emotional face processing." Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 10.10
(2015): 1373-1382.
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