Empirical Studies Of Media Violence Impact On Young People

Studies to the effect of media violence have been in process in the west countries for over 70 years. During this process, some theories such as cultivation theory and social learning theory are well developed. The empirical studies on media violence had two respects: One is about the effect of media violence on teenager's behavior, in particular, the relationship between preferable media violence and offensive behavior of teenager is the focus of the research. Another is about the social and psychological influence of media violence to teenagers. In recent years, along with the development of the media environment in our country, the influence of media violence to minors causes increasing concern. The rating becomes the hot point of discussions and disputes, which sufficiently reflects the severity of the concern. But so far, what kind of influence has media violence produced to teenagers? We had not found related empirical studies on the question till now. For this, with cultivation theory as the primary theoretical hypothesis, adopting the approach of empirical study, my research will concentrate on the investigation which influence do the violence contents of entertainment programs in visual media produce contemporary teenagers, with a hope to verify the relevance of cultivation theory in the present media mechanism of our country, and to supply some scientific evidences for the solution of the existing question. The five chapters illustrate the main ideas of my research: By giving concern to the motivation of this topic, the introduction reviews the empirical study process in the west countries with USA as the representative covering the influence of media violence, and makes summary and comments on the present status of this research in our country. At the same time, it put forward the main research contents of this thesis:(1) Induce, generalize and introduce the related theories and the research process of the west countries. (2) Viewing the context of china 's development and change of media environment, it use the denotation and hypothesis from cultivation theory, inquiry into the effect of mass media to contemporary teenagers from the view of violence. Chapter one has a concrete review of the media violence effect research in the west countries with USA as the representative. It have comments on the theories, development process, researching methods and features, and developing trends in the western countries. Chapter two firstly describes and analyzes the psychological development characteristics of the contemporary teenagers. It then draws into the result that the visual communication era which is featured with images and pictures as the center, the visual media build a sound platform for visual cultural development of sensitive appearance which is featured with images and pictures as the center, comparing with the rationalism morphology which is featured with language as its center and which people is increasingly changing from it to the sensitive appearance, and it also creates deep influence to teenagers. With the rapid development of digital technology, great change takes place in medium appearance itself, which brings great influence in the aesthetics, thoughts and personality psychology. Chapter three presents the contents of questionnaire to teenagers and analyses the beloved programs of visual media, delineating a mostly outline of the programs teenagers normally get in touch with. It tries to express the performance, classification and implied meaning of the contents of media violence into realistic representation, aesthetical representation of violence, rational recounting strategy of violence and violence utopia. Finally, from the angle of the psychology, it explains and analyzes the reason why violence becomes a permanent performance topic of media. Chapter four discusses the relationship between media and the violence by taking cultivation theory as th...