(Press-News.org) BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Despite growing concern about the effects of media violence on children, violent television shows and movies continue to be produced and marketed to them. An Indiana University research study concludes that violence doesn't add anything to their enjoyment of such programs and their characters.
In a research study published in the journal Media Psychology, Andrew J. Weaver, an assistant professor of telecommunications in IU's College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues tested a common view presented by media producers that children like to watch violent programming.
"Violence isn't the attractive component in these cartoons, which producers seem to think it is. It's more other things that are often associated with the violence. It's possible to have those other components, such as action specifically, in non-violent ways," Weaver said in an interview. "I think we should be concerned about violent content in cartoons in terms of the potential effect. This is one way that we can get around that from a producer's point of view.
"You don't have to cram violence into these cartoons to get kids to like them. They'll like them without the violence, just as much if not more," he said.
Violent cartoons have been a staple of Saturday morning programming for decades and now are readily available on cable television channels specializing in children's shows and cartoons. Many classic cartoons, such as those in the "Looney Tunes" series, have featured slapstick violence. But in recent years, action programs such as "Pokemon" and "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" have drawn much attention both because of their violent content and their popularity with young people.
Some content analyses have found that as many as 70 percent of children's television shows have violent content.
"For many producers and media critics, the question is not if children love violence, but rather why children love violence," Weaver and his co-authors wrote in the paper. "Our goal in this study was to examine children's liking of violent content while independently manipulating the amount of action, which is often confounded with violence in the existing research."
Co-authors include Jakob Jensen of Purdue University, Nicole Martins of IU, Ryan Hurley of North Carolina State University and Barbara Wilson of the University of Illinois.
The researchers used a sample group of 128 school children, ranging in age from five to 11 and from kindergarten to the fourth grade. There were a nearly equal number of boys and girls.
Research assistants showed each child one of four versions of a five-minute animated short created for the study and then led them through a questionnaire. The short was designed to resemble familiar slapstick cartoons. Four different versions of the cartoon were used. Six violent scenes were added to one version, which was carried out by both characters and in response to earlier aggression. Nine action scenes were added to another version. Two other versions had lower amounts of action or violence.
What they found was violent content had an indirect negative effect on whether boys enjoyed a program, due to how they identified with the characters.
"That was a little surprising," said Weaver, the father of two young sons. "There is a lot of talk about boys being more violent and more aggressive, for whatever reason, social or biological, and yet we found that they identified with the characters more when they were non-violent . . . They liked the characters more and they enjoyed the overall cartoon more.
"This is good news. If producers are willing to work on making cartoons that aren't violent so much as action packed, they can still capture their target audience better . . . and without the harmful consequences."
On the other hand, among girls violence did not decrease wishful identification of the characters. Weaver believes this may be because such slapstick cartoons are geared more toward boys than girls. Also, girls perceived the characters as boys, even though they were created without sexual attributes.
"They're not going to identify with what they perceive to be male characters, whether they are violent or not," he said. "They didn't prefer the more violent programming. They were just using other cues besides the character's violent or non-violent behavior to determine how much they enjoyed the show."
Weaver would like to apply his research to characters in more female-oriented programs, like "The Powerpuff Girls." He also recognizes that violence is seen by producers as an easy means to introduce action and conflict into a story.
"Alternatives could be things related to speed -- characters going fast, moving quickly. It was one way that we manipulated action in this study," he said. "If you can increase action without increasing violence, which clearly is possible as we did it in this study, then you can increase the enjoyment without potential harmful effects that violence can bring.
The cartoon the researchers used, "Picture Perfect Thief," featured a villain called Eggle, who attempted to steal a painting created by a hero called Orangehead. Eggle ultimately fails and the hero's painting wins first place in an art show. It was created by a friend using Macromedia Flash.
INFORMATION:Editors: An electronic copy of the paper is available from George Vlahakis at 812-855-0846 or gvlahaki@indiana.edu. Video of the cartoon created for the study is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU1-yL84bl4.
END
DALLAS – May 24, 2011 – A gynecologist and a molecular biologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center have collaborated to show for the first time that pelvic organ prolapse – a condition in which the uterus, bladder or vagina protrude from the body – is caused by a combination of a loss of elasticity and a breakdown of proteins in the vaginal wall.
Pelvic organ prolapse affects many women older than 50 years of age. Besides creating pelvic pressure, prolapse can lead to other pelvic-floor disorders such as urinary and fecal incontinence, and can affect sexual function.
"We ...
PULLMAN, Wash.—Don't get him wrong: Fred Gittes is, in his words, "extremely squeamish."
But then a scientist with forensics training told him that crime scene investigators could use a better way to analyze blood spatters. The physicist in Gittes rose to the challenge.
"It seems as though what was being done was very crude from a physics point of view and that intrigued me," he says.
Along with Chris Varney, a doctoral candidate in physics, Gittes has worked out a system that can often determine exactly where blood spatters originate, a critical piece of evidence in ...
The magnitude 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck Japan on March 11 were like a one-two punch – first violently shaking, then swamping the islands – causing tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Now Stanford researchers have discovered the catastrophe was caused by a sequence of unusual geologic events never before seen so clearly.
"It was not appreciated before this earthquake that this size of earthquake was possible on this plate boundary," said Stanford geophysicist Greg Beroza. "It was thought that typical earthquakes ...
Scientists from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), in collaboration with Linköping University, Sweden, have shown that regions of graphene of different thickness can be easily identified in ambient conditions using Electrostatic Force Microscopy (EFM).
The exciting properties of graphene are usually only applicable to the material that consists of one or two layers of the graphene sheets. Whilst synthesis of any number of layers is possible, the thicker layers have properties closer to the more common bulk graphite.
For device applications one- and two-layer graphene ...
In a large study of men in Japan, the presence of fatty liver disease by ultrasonography showed an inverse ( reduced risk) association with the frequency of moderate alcohol consumption; however, there was some suggestion of an increase in fatty liver disease with higher volume of alcohol consumed per day. Moderate drinkers had lower levels of obesity than did non-drinkers, and both obesity and metabolic abnormalities were positively associated with fatty liver disease.
These findings support the results of a number of other recent studies showing that moderate drinking ...
We still need to halt the increase of global carbon emissions before 2020 and in the long term reduce emissions by at least 50% up to 2050. Ultimately, we will have to reduce carbon emissions to close to zero or even remove carbon completely from the atmosphere.
However, climate change is not the only energy challenge:
We need energy services to drive global economic development
We need to provide equal access to modern energy worldwide
We need to provide electricity to the 25% of the world's population still without electricity
We need to provide modern energy ...
Boston, MA – Electronic medical records (EMRs) have been in use for more than 30 years, but have only increased in utilization in recent years, due in part to research supporting the benefits of EMRs and federal legislation. As EMRs have become a standard in medical care, there is a need for additional research of how the system and usage can be refined. A group of researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital have done just that, and discovered that one way false information can make its way into EMRs is due to users' reliance on copying and pasting material within the ...
A novel way to immobilise radioactive forms of iodine using a microwave, has been discovered by an expert at the University of Sheffield.
Iodine radioisotopes are produced by fission of uranium fuel in a nuclear reactor. Radioactive iodine is of concern because it is highly mobile in the environment and selective uptake by the thyroid gland can pose a significant cancer risk following long term exposure. Furthermore, iodine-129, which is a type of radioactive iodine, has an extremely long half life of 15.7 million years, so is one of the most significant long term hazards ...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Next time you go on vacation, you may want to think twice before shooting hundreds of photos of that scenic mountain or lake.
A new study from MIT neuroscientists shows that the most memorable photos are those that contain people, followed by static indoor scenes and human-scale objects. Landscapes? They may be beautiful, but they are, in most cases, utterly forgettable.
"Pleasantness and memorability are not the same," says MIT graduate student Phillip Isola, one of the lead authors of the paper, which will be presented at the IEEE Conference on ...
The recent data breaches faced by Sony, Epsilon and TJX once again highlight the risks that lapses in governance pose to enterprise data security. To protect valuable company and customer data, enterprises need to implement IT security governance as a mechanism for managing authorization and access via pre-defined rules and policies. Industry-standard technologies, such as the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XAMCL), are helping to facilitate this governance by enabling more efficient and nuanced security policy enforcement.
IT architects and developers can ...
