Two experiments tested the hypothesis that violent media make aggressive constructs more accessible to viewers. In Experiment 1, participants made free associations to homonyms, with one meaning more aggressive than the other; and to nonaggressive words after viewing a violent or nonviolent video. Participants who saw the violent video listed more aggressive associations to both types of words. In Experiment 2, participants completed a lexical-decision task after viewing a violent or nonviolent video. Participants pressed one key if a string of letters was an English word, or another key if it was a nonword. Half of the words were aggressive and half were nonaggressive. Participants who saw the violent video had faster reaction times to aggressive words. Videotape content did not influence reaction times to nonaggressive words. These results suggest that violent media prime cognitive-associative networks related to aggression.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Abelson, R. P. (1976). Script processing in attitude formation and decision making. In J. S. Carroll &J. W. Payne (Eds.), Cognition and social behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
2.
American Psychological Association . (1993). Violence and youth: Psychology 's responseWashington, DC: Author.
3.
Anderson, C. A. (1997). Effects of violent movies and trait hostility on hostile feelings and aggressive thoughts. Aggressive Behavior, 23, 161-178.
4.
Anderson, C. A. , Anderson, K. B., & Deuser, W. E. (1996). Examining an affective aggression framework: Weapon and temperature effects on aggressive thoughts, affect, and attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 366-376.
5.
Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
6.
Bandura, A. (1983). Psychological mechanisms of aggression. In R. G. Geen & E. I. Donnerstein (Eds.), Aggression: Theoretical and empirical reviews: Vol. 1. Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 140). New York: Academic Press.
7.
Bargh, J. A. , Lombardi, W. J., & Higgins, E. T. (1988). Automaticity of chronically accessible constructs in person x situation effects on person perception: It's just a matter of time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 599-605.
8.
Bargh, J. A. , & Pietromonaco, P. (1982). Automatic information processing and social perception: The influence of trait information presented outside of conscious awareness on impression formation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 437-449.
9.
Berkowitz, L. (1962). Aggression: A social psychological analysis. New YorkMcGraw-Hill.
10.
Berkowitz, L. (1974). Some determinants of impulsive aggression: The role of mediated associations with reinforcement for aggression. Psychological Review, 81, 165-176.
11.
Berkowitz, L. (1984). Some effects of thoughts on anti-social and prosocial influences of media effects: A cognitive-neoassociation analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 410-427.
12.
Berkowitz, L. (1986). Situational influences on reactions to observed violence. Journal of Social Issues, 42, 93-103.
13.
Berkowitz, L. (1993). Aggression: Its causes, consequences, and controlNew York: McGraw-Hill.
14.
Berkowitz, L. , & Le Page, A. (1967). Weapons as aggression-eliciting stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7, 202-207.
15.
Betancourt, H. , & Blair, I. (1992). A cognition (attribution)emotion model of violence in conflict situations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18, 343-350.
16.
Bower, G. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129-148.
17.
Bruner,J. S. (1957). On perceptual readiness. Psychological Review, 64, 123-152.
18.
Bruner,J. S. (1958). Social psychology and perception. In E. E. Maccoby, T. M. Newcomb, & E. L. Hartley (Eds.), Readings in social psychology (3rd ed., pp. 85-94). New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
19.
Bushman, B. J. (1995). Moderating role of trait aggressiveness in the effects ofviolent media on aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 950-960.
20.
Bushman, B. J. , & Geen, R. G. (1990). Role of cognitive-motional mediators and individual differences in the effects of media violence on aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 156-163.
21.
Cacioppo,J. T. , & Petty, R. E. (1981). Social psychological procedures for cognitive response assessment: The thought listing technique. In T. Merluzzi, C. Glass, & M. Genest (Eds.), Cognitive assessment (pp. 309-342). New York: Guilford.
22.
Carver, C. S. , Ganellen, R. J., Froming, W. J., & Chambers, W. (1983). Modeling: An analysis in terms of category accessibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 403-421.
23.
Collins, A. , & Loftus, E. (1975). A spreading-activation theory of semantic memory. Psychological Review, 82, 407-428.
24.
Dodge, K. A. , & Crick, N. R. (1990). Social information-processing bases of aggressive behavior in children. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16, 8-22.
25.
Dodge, K. A. , Price, J. M., Bachorowski, J., & Newman, J. P. (1990). Hostile attributional biases in severely aggressive adolescents. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 99, 385-392.
26.
Ferguson, T. J. , & Rule, B. G. (1983). An attributional perspective on anger and aggression. In RP G. Geen & E. I. Donnerstein (Eds.), Aggression: Theoretical and empirical reviews (Vol. 1, pp. 41-74). New York: Academic Press.
27.
Fleming, K. K. (1993). Phonologically mediated priming in spoken and printed word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 272-284.
28.
Geen, R. G. , & Berkowitz, L. (1966). Name-mediated aggressive cue properties. Journal of Personality, 34, 456-465.
29.
Geen, R. G. , & Thomas, S. L. (1986). The immediate effects of media violence on behavior. Journal of Social Issues, 42, 7-27.
30.
Gerbner, G. (1994, July). Television violence: The art of asking the wrong question. The World e&I, pp. 385-397.
31.
Goodenough, F. L. (1942). The use of free association in the objective measurement of personality. In Q. McNemar & M. A. Merrill (Eds.), Studies in personality: Contributed in honor of Lewis M. Terman (pp. 87-103). New York: McGraw-Hill.
32.
Graham, S. , & Hudley, C. (1994). Attributions of aggressive and nonaggressive African-American male early adolescents: A study of construct accessibility. Developmental Psychology, 30, 365-373.
33.
Grainger, J. , & Ferrand, L. (1994). Phonology and orthography in visual word recognition: Effects of masked homophone primes. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 218-233.
34.
Higgins, E. , & King, G. (1981). Accessibility of social constructs: Information processing consequences of individual and contextual variability. In N. Cantor &J. Kihlstrom (Eds.), Personality, cognition, and social interaction (pp. 69-122). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
35.
Huesmann, L. R. (1986). Psychological processes promoting the relation between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior by the viewer. Journal of Social Issues, 4Z125-139.
36.
Huston, A. C. , Donnerstein, E., Fairchild, H., Feshbach, N. D., Katz, P. A., Murray, J. P., Rubinstein, E. A., Wilcox, B. L., & Zuckerman, D. (1992). Bigworld, small screen: The role of television in American society. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
37.
Johnson, M. K. , & Hasher, L. (1987). Human learning and memory. In M. R Rosenzweig & L. W. Porter (Eds.), Annual review of psychology (Vol. 39, pp. 631-668). Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews.
38.
Jung, C. G. (1918). Studies in word association. New York: Dodd, Mead.
39.
Kohlmeyer, S. W. (1992). Picture Perception Lab: A program for picture perception experiments on the Macintosh II. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 24, 67-71.
40.
Lang, P. J. (1979). A bio-informational theory of emotional imagery. Psychophysiology, 16, 495-512.
41.
Lesch, M. F. , & Pollatsek, A. (1993). Automatic access of semantic information by phonological codes in visual word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 285-294.
42.
Leyens, J. P. , & Dunand, M. (1991). Priming aggressive thoughts: The effects of the anticipation of a violent movie upon the aggressive behavior of the spectators. European Journal of Social Psychology, 21, 507-516.
43.
Merikle, P. M. , & Reingold, E. M. (1991). Comparing direct (explicit) and indirect (implicit) measures to study unconscious memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 17, 224-233.
44.
Morton, J. (1970). A functional model for memory. In D. A. Norman (Ed.), Models of human memory (pp. 203-254). New York: Academic Press.
45.
National Television Violence Study . (1996). National television violence study: Scientific papers 1994-1995. Studio City, CA: Media scope.
46.
National Television Violence Study . (1997). National television violence study (Volume 2). Studio City, CA.Media scope
47.
Orne, M. T. (1962). On the social psychology of the psychological experiment: With particular reference to demand characteristics and their implications. American Psychologist, 17, 776-783.
48.
Powell, S. (Producer), & Hewlett, S. (Director). (1995). The killing screens [Film]. London: Panorama/British Broadcasting Corporation.
49.
Roediger, H. L., III. (1990). Implicit memory: Retention without remembering. American Psychologist, 45, 1043-1056.
50.
Schacter, D. L. (1987). Implicit memory: History and current status. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 501-518.
51.
Secord, P. F. (1953). Objectification of word-association procedures by the use of homonyms: A measure of body catharsis. Journal of Personality, 21, 479-495.
52.
Sedikides, C. , & Skowronski, J. J. (1990). Towards reconciling personality and social psychology: A construct accessibility approach. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 5, 531-546.
53.
Shrout, P. E. , & Fleiss, J. L. (1979). Intraclass correlations: Uses in assessing rater reliability. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 420-428.
54.
Thorndike, E. L. , & Lorge, I. (1944). The teacher's word book of 30,000 words. New York: Teachers College Press.
55.
U.S. Bureau of the Census . (1996). Statistical abstract of the United States: 1996 (116th ed.). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
56.
Wann, D. L. , & Branscombe, N. R. (1990). Person perception when aggressive or nonaggressive sports are primed. Aggressive Behavior, 16, 27-32.
57.
Weiner, B. (1995). Judgments of responsibility: A foundation for a theory of social conduct. New York: Guilford.
58.
Wyer, R. S., Jr. , & Srull, T. K. (1981). Category accessibility: Some theoretical and empirical issues concerning the processing of social stimulus information. In E. T. Higgins, C. P. Herman, & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Social cognition: The Ontario Symposium (Vol. 1, pp. 161-197). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
59.
Zelli, A. , Huesmann, L. R., & Cervone, D. (1995). Social inference and individual differences in aggression: Evidence for spontaneous judgments of hostility. Aggressive Behavior, 21, 405-417.
