Aggression

Ostrov, Jamie M., et al. "Media Exposure, Aggression and Prosocial Behavior During Early Childhood: A Longitudinal Study." //Social Development// 15.4 (2006): 612- 27. Web. 26 Aug. 2010.

-“The current public health concern may only get worse, given that nearly 70 percent of children’s television shows contain displays of physical aggression with 14 violent acts displayed per hour, compared with less than four violent acts in non-children’s programming (Wilson, Smith, Potter, Kunkel, Linz, Colvin et al., 2002).” (613) -“In fact, recent media theorists have suggested that chronic and frequent exposure to violent media and aggressive depictions may influence the display of not only physical and verbal aggression but also relational aggression among young children (Buchanan, Gentile, Nelson, Walsh & Hensel, 2002; Gentile, Linder & Walsh, 2003).” (613) -“Social aggression consists of non-confrontational behaviors (see Xie, Swift, Cairns &   Cairns, 2002) and has recently been redefined to include verbal disparagement and non-verbal aggression (i.e., rolling eyes, negative body posture, etc.) and is thus a more conceptually diverse construct (Galen & Underwood, 1997).” (614) -“The gender-linked hypothesis of aggression during early childhood, stating that boys will more often use physical aggression than girls and that girls will more often use relational aggression than boys to fulfill gender-specific social goals (see Crick & Grotpeter, 1995), has been supported in recent research.” (614) -“Early childhood (i.e., aged between two to five years) may be an especially salient developmental period for understanding how young children begin to attend, store, recall, and reproduce simple and complex behavioral patterns acquired from television, video, and other media sources (Barr & Hayne, 1999; Gentile & Sesma, 2003).” (615) -“That is, young children who are exposed to prosocial models and educational media content will be more likely to model prosocial behaviors during interactions with their peers concurrently and prospectively (Bandura, 1977; Fisch et al., 1999).” (615) -“It is likely that boys and girls are watching similar programming (an inspection of our data suggests that this is the case), and boys and girls are attending to and learning different behavioral tactics and schemas from this early media exposure.” (621) -“These findings indicated that parental monitoring of media exposure in the home may have both concurrent and future effects on young children’s social behavior at school with their peers. These findings also provide further evidence of the importance of the caregiver in facilitating and controlling the media to which young children are exposed.” (622) -“Media effects research has begun to differentiate the effects that may be due to the //content// of media from those that may be due to the //amount// of media consumed, and it is clear that these dimensions often provide distinct effects (cf. Anderson et al., 2001; Gentile & Stone, 2006; Gentile, Lynch, Linder & Walsh, 2004).” (622) -“These findings may suggest that too much media consumption regardless of content, in general, can have negative consequences for peer relationships.” (622) -“It is likely that young children do not attend to the overall ‘lesson’ in the manner an older child or adult can, but instead learn from each of the behaviors shown, including the explicit relationally aggressive behaviors.” (622) -“Furthermore, one of the developmental tasks of early childhood is to learn sex roles, and television may play a role in helping to transmit stereotypical sex roles, including girls’ higher use of relational aggression and boys’ higher use of physical aggression, although this hypothesis has yet to be tested (Gentile & Sesma, 2003).” (623) -“The list of shows that the children in this sample were dominantly viewing what we would consider age-appropriate media, but the effects were not only positive.” (623) -“If our observation that even educational and prosocial shows designed for young children display high levels of relational aggression is correct, it may be time to reassess both what is appropriate or harmful for children to watch and how children’s programming may need to change to maximize the benefits while minimizing the harms.” (623) -“Specifically, researchers using teacher, peer and observational methods have documented that boys are significantly more likely than girls to display and receive frequent levels of physical aggression, especially in the company of male peers.” (614)