Priming Of Weapon Pictures And Violent Movies On Youngsters' Aggressive Cognition

For nearly years, many film and television works include many violent contents, the bloody fighting and killing scenes have great impacts on audience's aggressive cognition, aggressive affect and aggressive behavior. There are many theories about aggression, such as Social Learning Theory, Cognitive New Association Model of Aggression, Script Theory and so no. Anderson's General Aggression Model (GAM) is based on above theories. According to GAM, both situational and person variables are viewed as significantly contributing to aggression. Media violence and the individual variables can affect the individual's current internal state through three routes---cognition, emotion and physiological arousal. Individuals assess the current internal state and external environment and act accordingly.The main purpose of this research was to examine the effects of two input variables—viewing of weapon pictures and viewing of violent movie—on the cognitive cognition, and we want to know weather it has difference among different gender and aggressive level. The thesis consists of two experiments:Experiment 1: weapon pictures and plant pictures as priming stimulates, aggressive words and nonaggressive words as target words, and high school students as subjects, using semantic categorization task, discuss the affects of weapon pictures on aggressive cognition in experiment one.The aggression accessibility scores were higher in the weapon-prime condition than in the plant-prime condition. A repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that this interaction was statistically significant. It was proved that viewing weapon pictures has effect on adolescent aggressive cognition. Further analysis revealed that viewing weapon pictures increased the aggression accessibility scores of male participants, but had relatively little impact on female participants, and increased the aggression accessibility scores of middle aggressive participants, but had relatively little impact on low aggressive participants and high aggressive participants.Experiment 2:violent movie clip and nonviolent movie clip as priming stimulates, aggressive words and nonaggressive words as target words, and high school students as subjects, this experiment discussed the effect of viewing violent movie on aggressive cognition by modified Stroop color naming task. Aggressive cognition was assessed using automatic priming task.The main affects of movie clips shows no significant differences. There is no significant difference between experimental group (watching violent movie) and control group (watching nonviolent movie). The movie*gender interaction approached significance. It revealed that watching the violent movie increased the aggression accessibility scores of male participants, but had relatively little impact on female participants. The movie*aggressive trait interaction approached significance, too. It revealed that watching the violent movie increased the aggression accessibility scores of high aggressive participants, but had relatively little impact on low aggressive participants. It was proved that viewing violent movie has effect on adolescent cognition, but only for high trait aggressiveness and male.Those two experiments above showed:weapon pictures and violent movies bring effects on youngster's aggressive cognition. It is valuable both in theory and practice.