The world we live in thrives on media use; it is useful in all aspects of life. Children spend lots of time watching television, playing video games, listening to music and using the internet. The average U.S child spends about four and a half hours listening to music, four and a half hours watching television or movies and seven hours a day on social media. Media violence is a threat to adolescents and is increases violence and aggression. “Exposure to violence in media, including television, movies, music, and video games, represents a significant risk to the health of children and adolescents. Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed.” (American Academy of Pediatrics) While many think that violent media doesn’t have an impact on adolescents because it isn’t real, adolescent behavior is in fact affected by aggressive media.
Digesting violent or aggressive activity regularly negatively affects a child’s subconscious mind. Repeatedly viewing such behaviors embed certain ideas in the subconscious mind to be considered good, even if it is not. People and Society explain how to positively impact a child’s subconscious mind, “Children are very receptive during these ages [zero to eight] when their right brains are active and their left brains - which includes critical thinking - ae not yet fully functional. It is during those formative years that subconscious mind programming naturally occurs. It is how people sabotage their [a child’s] success the hurtful words.” One's subconscious mind is their auto function, it allows one to breathe, holds fight or flight mechanisms, and beliefs. Children and adolescents shouldn’t view violent media because they will, in turn, develop the skill of being aggressive towards others.
Adolescents that are exposed to violent movies repeatedly are exposed to scenes and images that could lead to desensitization. Many individuals don’t think about the effect of violent movies, but these movies have been known to lead to bullying or violent behavior. Dafna Lemish (Tel Aviv University) conducted a study on the effect of watching the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) “Children aged 7–12 years evaluated their own and their peers’ behaviour. Those who watched WWF were thought to be more violent in school, and those children already predisposed to violence were more likely to imitate the behaviour they saw on television.” (Faith McLellan) In the short term, media violence [more specifically movies] contributes to aggression but only about 5-10% of children's aggression. Normalizing cruel and violent behavior, makes the children lose sympathy for themselves or others.
Some adolescents do not understand that what they are watching is fiction and believe they should relate it to their lives. They are inclined to act out what they are viewing, even though they have a sense of morality when one is shown that violence is okay all sense of morality goes out the door. “a staged fantasy, a concept that many children have difficulty comprehending because they lack the cognitive and literacy skills necessary to interpret what they are seeing.”(Faith McLellan) Because it’s difficult for them to comprehend what’s happening, they act on what they’ve seen in there lives. In turn, violent movies or television shows have a negative impact.
Music plays a key role in the socialization of children and adolescents. Popular music is present almost everywhere and is easily accessible via radio, various records, the internet, and new technologies, enabling teenagers to hear it in a variety of settings and circumstances, alone or with friends. Over the years, particularly in certain genres, songs have become more overt in their references to alcohol, sex, and violence. As with popular music, the interpretation and impact of music-video messages are important because research has shown that exposure to violence, sexual messages, sexual stereotypes, and the use of abusive substances in music videos result in significant changes in young viewers ' behaviors and attitudes. Songs with violent lyrics increase aggression-related thoughts and emotions, and according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association (APA), this effect is directly related to the violence in the lyrics. Iowa State University and the Texas Department of Human Services conducted a study that uses seven violent songs and eight non-violent songs to examine their effects on adolescents,
Violent songs led to more aggressive interpretations of ambiguously aggressive words, increased the relative speed with which people read aggressive vs. nonaggressive words, and increased the proportion of word fragments that we
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