On-screen violence 'can lead to aggression'

Watching violent films, TV programmes and video games can desensitise teenage boys and potentially make them aggressive, new evidence suggests.

Scientists exposed 22 boys aged 14 to 17 to short clips of violent

videos while using scans to study their brain activity.

Electrodes attached to the boys' fingers measured the electrical conductivity of their skin. This varies with sweat levels and is a sensitive way of measuring emotional response.

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The results were striking. The longer the teenagers watched the videos, the more they became desensitised by those depicting scenes of "mild" and "moderate" violence.

Study leader Dr Jordan Grafman, from the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Maryland in the US, said: "We found that as the boys were exposed to more violent videos over time, their activation in brain regions concerned with emotional reactivity decreased.

"The important new finding is that exposure to the most violent videos inhibits emotional reactions to similar aggressive videos over time and implies that normal adolescents will feel fewer emotions over time as they are exposed to similar videos..

"The implications of this are many and include the idea that continued exposure to violent videos will make an adolescent less sensitive to violence, more accepting of violence, and more likely to commit aggressive acts since the emotional component associated with aggression is reduced and normally acts as a brake on aggressive behaviour."

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The study, combining information from behaviour, brain activity and skin conductance, was the most comprehensive yet looking at links between aggression and violence in the media.

The findings were published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

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