Page 289 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

278 SPARKS AND SPARKS

small statistical effect might seem to some to be virtually unpreventable
and nearly guaranteed by the vast diversity of people in any given audi-
ence. The difficulty in untangling these issues has tended to obscure the
clear consensus that exists among scholars about the fact that exposure to
media violence is causally related to aggressive behavior.

Theoretical Mechanisms

Catharsis. One of the earliest theoretical formulations proposed to
account for the relationship between exposure to media violence and
aggressive behavior was symbolic catharsis (Feshbach, 1955). The idea
formulated by Feshbach was one that pleased media producers because
it predicted that exposure to media violence would permit angry or
frustrated viewers to purge their feelings such that after viewing was
completed, they would be less likely to behave aggressively. The idea
was that viewing media violence would permit viewers to engage in
fantasy aggression, thus discharging their pent up hostility in a satisfac-
tory way and reducing the need to carry out aggression in the behav-
ioral realm. One early study that tested this theory on nursery-school
children failed to find any evidence (Siegel, 1956). The children in this
study who viewed media violence (a Woody Woodpecker cartoon) be-
haved more aggressively following exposure, revealing a tendency that
was completely opposite of the one predicted by the catharsis hypothe-
sis, but in keeping with the findings of most of the studies that were
completed in later years. These results notwithstanding, Feshbach and
Singer (1971) carried out a field experiment that exposed institutional-
ized boys to a media diet of violent or nonviolent films and observed
the extent to which the boys’ subsequent behavior was either aggressive
or nonaggressive. The results seemed encouraging to the catharsis
hypothesis because, as predicted by the theory, the boys who watched
the violent films behaved less aggressively than their counterparts who
were exposed to nonviolent material. However, scholars came to under-
stand these results in a context that was very different from the one that
Feshbach and Singer suggested. The boys who watched the nonviolent
films did not enjoy this type of media to the same extent as the boys
assigned to watch violent films. Thus, the difference in likability, quite
apart from the differences in violent content, may have been sufficient
to produce higher levels of aggressive behavior among the boys
assigned to watch nonviolence. Ultimately, the failure to find any solid
confirmations of the catharsis hypothesis, combined with the relatively
large number of studies that produced findings directly counter to this
formulation, resulted in a virtual abandonment of this notion by the
research community.