Step 1: Read the following article, which was adapted from a science magazine.

Guns, Lies, and Video

1     In a recent survey, seven out of ten parents said they would never let their children play with toy guns. Yet the average seventh grader spends at least four hours a week playing video games, and about half of those games have violent themes, like Nuclear Strike. Clearly, parents make a distinction between violence on a screen and that acted out with plastic M-16s. Should they?

2     With decades of researching more than a thousand studies, psychologists have shown a link between media violence and real aggression, and prestigious health organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics concur. One expert estimates that violence in TV, movies, and music can account for 10 percent of juvenile violence in society. Scientists now believe video games are the most provocative medium yet.

3     "With video games, you're not only passively receiving attitudes and behaviors, you're rehearsing them," says pediatrician, Michael Rich, a former filmmaker and the current head of the Center on Media and Child Health at Harvard University.

4     But the case isn't quite closed. Last year, psychologist Jonathan Freedman of the University of Toronto published an outspoken indictment of some of the field's most influential studies. The "bulk of the research does not show that television or movie violence has any negative effects," he argues in Media Violence and Its Effect on Aggression. In 1999 editorial titled "Guns, Lies, and Videotape," the redoubtable British journal The Lancet admitted that "experts are divided on the subject," and that "both groups can support their views with a sizable amount of published work."

5     Those who grew up with the Three Stooges or Super Mario Brothers may have trouble seeing their youthful pastimes in a sinister light. But televised violence has been a topic of national consternation almost from the first broadcast. Congressional hearings began in 1952, and the surgeon general reported on the problem in 1972. "We've been studying it at least since then, but the studies haven't given us definite answers," says Kimberly Thompson, director of Kids Risk Project at the School of Public Health at Harvard. Thompson and others believe that the rise of TV viewing in American households may be at least partly responsible for the eightfold increase in violent crime in this country between 1960 and 1990. Today a typical kid spends two hours a day watching television, and children's programs average between 20 and 35 violent acts per hour—four times as many as adult programs. "The message that's going out to children is that violence is OK or it's funny or it's somehow heroic," says Jeffrey G. Johnson, a psychiatric epidemiologist a the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York.

6     Common sense argues that such exposure must have some effect. Designing studies to measure it is another story. So far, for example, there aren't any universal standards defining or quantifying violent content. Many early investigations simply proved that aggressive kids like to watch aggressive TV, without illuminating which tendency leads to which. And it's obvious that poverty, abuse, and ready access to weapons can put a child on the wrong path too.

7     One way to distinguish among potential causes of juvenile violence is by studying large numbers of people over long periods of time. Last year, Johnson and his colleagues published results of a 17-year study following more than 700 kids from an average age of 6 to adulthood. They tallied the hours each subject spent in front of the tube and compared those numbers with subsequent acts of aggression, ranging from threats to criminal assault The trends are clear, says Johnson: Kids who spent more than three hours a day watching television at age 14 were more than four times as likely to have acted aggressively by age 22 than kids who watched TV for less than an hour. The connection held up even after researchers accounted for other possible culprits, including poverty, neglect, and bad neighborhoods—and even among tube-addled females, who, like the rest of the subjects were predominantly white and Catholic.

8     "It's not just that TV just triggers aggression in aggressive people," Johnson says. "We saw this in 'nice' girls too."

9     Some laboratory studies hint that violent programming may lead to a malevolent state of mind. In one classic example, 5- to 9- year-olds were told they could press buttons that would either further or foil their playmates' attempts to win a game. Children who watched segments of the 1970s crime drama The Untouchables beforehand showed more willingness to hinder their peers' efforts than did those who watched a track race.

10     To eliminate the criticism of possible flaws in their studies, one researcher compared only video games that elevated his subject's heart rates to the same degree. And child psychologist John Murray of Kansas State University in Manhattan used real-time MRI scans to observe whether violent content triggers unique patterns of brain activity. One group of Murray's kids watched fight scenes from Rocky IV, the other, an action-packed mystery called Ghostwriter. Only the boxing bouts activated an area in the right hemisphere called the right posterior cingulated, which may store long-term memories of trauma.

11     The advertising industry is built on the faith that media content and consumption can change human behavior, Rich points out. So why does society question the influence of dramatized violence? To many, violent entertainment remains entertaining. Americans appear to regard its consequences, whatever they may be, as an acceptable risk. Even hard-liners like Anderson, Rich, and the AMA don't recommend banning violent content. Instead, they lobby for greater parental awareness and control.

12     But maybe parents themselves should beware. The effect of violent media on adults is still unexplored territory. And television news, a staple of grown-up media consumption, carries some of the nastiest carnage on the airwaves.

13     "There is some evidence that violent media has a bigger effect on children," Anderson says. "But there's no age group that's immune."

Step 2: Answer the questions about this selection in Lab Activity 58 in your book.

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