Abstract
The main purpose of the study was to examine the impact of violent movies on aggressive cognition of Chineseadolescents. A modified STROOP word-color naming task was used to examine whether aggressive words couldprime Chinese adolescents’ aggressive cognition. The result showed no significant differences in aggressivelyactivated score (AAS) for violent movie and non-violent movies, and that no significant differences were foundin main affect of movie type (violent movie vs. non-violent movie). However, it did reveal significant MovieType × Gender interaction, and that aggressive cognition was significantly affected by violent movie for boys,but was not for girls. Additionally, significant Movie Type × Aggressive Level interaction was found, and thataggressive cognition was significantly influenced by violent movie only for high-aggressive level (HL)participants, not for low-aggressive level (LL) and mid-aggressive level (ML) participants, which partlysupported General Aggressive Model (GAM). Limitations of the present study were also discussed.
Highlights
Aggressive cognition was a type of implicit aggression hided in human brain, which intended to harm others who were motivated to avoid that harm
The present study aimed to examine the effects of violent movie exposure on Chinese adolescents’ aggressive cognition by employing modified STROOP word-color naming task across different genders and aggressive levels
Participants ranged in age from 15 to 19 years (M=16.46, SD=1.23), with no color blindness and normal vision correction. 37 participants watching STREET FIGHTER were regarded as the experimental group, and 37 participants watching AIR CRISIS were regarded as the control group. 2 participants watching AIR CRISIS were deleted as their accuracy rate below 80 percent in statistics, and the final participants involved in statistics were 72, please see table 1
Summary
Aggressive cognition was a type of implicit aggression (e.g., affect, emotion, thought, plan) hided in human brain, which intended to harm others who were motivated to avoid that harm. Considerable researches reported that media violence (e.g., TV, movie, video games) affected individuals’ aggression (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007; Wood et al, 1991; Bushman, 1997; Bushman & Anderson, 2007; Zeng et al, 1997). It confirmed that exposure to violent media could increase aggressive behavior (Wendy et al, 1991; Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Carnagey & Anderson, 2005; Hyde, 1984; Lagerspetz et al, 1988). It was found that subjects watching violent movies thought more aggressive words by using lexical decision and word association task (Bushman, 1995). Researchers found that subjects playing violent sports video games have higher aggression than others by using word naming task (Anderson & Carnagey, 2009)
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