[Senate Hearing 108-907]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 108-907
NEUROBIOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND THE IMPACT OF MEDIA
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SPACE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE,
SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
APRIL 10, 2003
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and
Transportation
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SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona, Chairman
TED STEVENS, Alaska ERNEST F. HOLLINGS, South Carolina
CONRAD BURNS, Montana DANIEL K. INOUYE, Hawaii
TRENT LOTT, Mississippi JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West
KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON, Texas Virginia
OLYMPIA J. SNOWE, Maine JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas JOHN B. BREAUX, Louisiana
GORDON SMITH, Oregon BYRON L. DORGAN, North Dakota
PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois RON WYDEN, Oregon
JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada BARBARA BOXER, California
GEORGE ALLEN, Virginia BILL NELSON, Florida
JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire MARIA CANTWELL, Washington
FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
Jeanne Bumpus, Republican Staff Director and General Counsel
Robert W. Chamberlin, Republican Chief Counsel
Kevin D. Kayes, Democratic Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Gregg Elias, Democratic General Counsel
------
Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas, Chairman
TED STEVENS, Alaska JOHN B. BREAUX, Louisiana
CONRAD BURNS, Montana JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West
TRENT LOTT, Mississippi Virginia
KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON, Texas JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts
JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada BYRON L. DORGAN, North Dakota
GEORGE ALLEN, Virginia RON WYDEN, Oregon
JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire BILL NELSON, Florida
FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on April 10, 2003................................... 1
Statement of Senator Brownback................................... 1
Witnesses
Anderson, Dr. Daniel R., Professor, Department of Psychology,
University of Massachusetts.................................... 26
Prepared statement........................................... 27
Cantor, Joanne, Ph.D., Professor Emerita, University of
Wisconsin-Madison.............................................. 14
Prepared statement........................................... 16
Kunkel, Dr. Dale, University of California, Santa Barbara........ 10
Prepared statement........................................... 12
Murray, John P., Ph.D., Professor, Kansas State University....... 29
Prepared statement........................................... 35
Rich, Michael, M.D., MPH, Director, Center on Media and Child
Health,
Children's Hospital Boston..................................... 3
Prepared statement........................................... 7
Appendix
Hollings, Hon. Ernest F., U.S. Senator from South Carolina,
prepared
statement...................................................... 45
NEUROBIOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND THE IMPACT OF MEDIA
----------
THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2003
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space,
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:30 p.m. in
room SR-253, Russell Senate Office Building, Hon. Sam
Brownback, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. SAM BROWNBACK,
U.S. SENATOR FROM KANSAS
Senator Brownback. Good afternoon, we will call the hearing
to order. It is a pleasure to be here today to discuss an
important public health issue. We are honored to have a
distinguished panel of witnesses. I appreciate your presence
and all of your hard work in this arena over the years.
We will discuss today the potential impact of the media on
children's health, and on the opportunity for neuroscience and
neurobiological research to give us additional tools and
information as we explore this issue. This is simply a
conversation about what sort of cultural environment we wish to
provide for our children and the information we need to provide
to their parents.
There is a growing body of hard and verifiable evidence
that suggests the violent and sexual content of entertainment
media can be harmful to children's development. Most of the
studies and reviews by Government and professional health
organizations showed a relationship stronger than many proven
associations, such as second-hand smoke and lung cancer, or
calcium intake and bone density. The studies plainly
demonstrate links between early exposure to entertainment
violence and aggressive attitudes and behaviors, increased
levels of violent crime against others, and desensitization to
real-life violence.
Recent studies, such as Professor Murray's brain mapping,
have only furthered this research with more intriguing
hypotheses, such as indicating that viewing made-up violence
affects us physically the same way that viewing real violence
does, registering in the areas of our brain that store long-
term memories of traumatic events.
Meanwhile, our children are exposed daily to heavy doses of
violence through their broad access to media--all at an age
when their minds and values are being formed and they are
developmentally incapable of distinguishing fantasy from
reality.
Even many adults have problems distinguishing fantasy from
reality. For example, how many times have adults confused
television actors and the characters they play? Look at some
classic shows, like ``Dr. Kildare''. It received thousands of
letters a week from adults seeking medical advice. That is why
the famous television ad had to come up with the tag line,
``I'm not a doctor, but I play one on television.''
This is a national issue, one that affects all of us. This
is clearly illustrated by a recently-released University of
Michigan study that presents some of the most powerful and
compelling evidence on the subject of television violence. This
longitudinal study, where the researchers followed the same
children and tracked the effects years later, discovered that
exposure to media violence during childhood directly predicts
young adult aggressive behavior for both males and females.
This is true even when the effects of socioeconomic status,
intellectual ability, and a variety of parenting factors are
controlled. That is a stunning conclusion. In other words,
contrary to our previous notions, violence does not
discriminate who it affects, regardless of one's social
standing, intellectual capabilities, or family conditions.
Now, think about it. Scientific research is clearly showing
that watching violence makes people more violent--and not just
at the time they watch the violence, that is, not just on the
schoolyard as children, but years later, as adults. Many of us
are already concerned about our society and our culture today--
what happens when this generation grows up?
We must understand the powerful public impact of
entertainment media. It plays a role in every part of our
lives, affecting us whether we realize it or not. Through
television, movies, the Internet, and more, the media helps
shape our attitudes and assumptions--it influences and, in many
ways, creates our decisions and behavior.
In this time of war, there is another key point we cannot
ignore: our entertainment media have a worldwide influence.
American movies, television shows, music, and video games are
popular exports. American entertainment is the most pervasive
and loudest ambassador we have. Unfortunately, its message is
too often destructive--and incorrect.
As a member of the Senator Foreign Relations Committee, I
have seen this far too often--and two researchers in Boston
recently proved this point clearly. In a Boston University
survey entitled, ``The Next Generation's Image of Americans,''
teenagers from 12 countries responded that they--though only 12
percent had ever visited America--considered Americans to be
violent, prone to criminal activity, and sexually immoral. The
key to their opinions? Their self-confessed exposure to
American television, movies, and pop music. Watching some of
the entertainment of today, it is no wonder they have this
view.
It is why this hearing is a particular critical event and
why it is especially important to fund additional research now.
The best way to determine what impact the popular culture has
on our attitudes and behavior, what influence our culture
exerts, is to do what we are doing today--to encourage research
discussion, to discover new evidence, and possible new
solutions.
We must continue to spread the message that the content of
our media is a serious public health concern. The risks to our
children, ourselves, our society, and, most important, our
future are unpredictable and incalculable. Therefore, we must
continue to analyze, evaluate, study, research, and,
oftentimes, criticize these products and their effects. These
actions are not only compatible with a free society and
liberty, but essential to their very survival.
We will discuss and have presentations today by researchers
both in the field of the overall impact of the media on
children, as well as those doing work in the recent area of
brain mapping, which looks at what is happening to a child's
mind when they are entertained with violence.
We are delighted to have our witnesses here today to
present on this important topic. In the first panel, we will
have Dr. Joanne Cantor, a professor, University of Wisconsin,
Madison; Dr. Dale Kunkel, University of California at Santa
Barbara, Washington Center, in Washington, D.C.; and Dr.
Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health
at Harvard University, and the Children's Hospital in Boston.
Dr. Rich will be introducing the various panel members and
some of their work to pull it together. So I would like to go
to you first, Dr. Rich, in this presentation. To make it clear
to people what we are after, it is to get the scientific basis
for what a number of us have felt for a long period of time,
which is that what our children are consuming for entertainment
is harmful to them when it has levels of violence and sexual
material that distort their life and what they are doing with
their lives.
Dr. Rich, you have appeared before me before in different
settings. I am always delighted to see you, and I appreciate
your groundbreaking work. Thanks for being here today.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL RICH, M.D., MPH, DIRECTOR,
CENTER ON MEDIA AND CHILD HEALTH,
CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL BOSTON
Dr. Rich. Thank you, Chairman Brownback. And thanks to the
Committee for the opportunity to testify to you today as a
pediatrician, as a child health researcher, as a media
producer, and as a parent.
My name is Dr. Michael Rich, and I am a doctor, but don't
play one on TV. I practice pediatrics and adolescent medicine
at Children's Hospital Boston, and I teach at Harvard Medical
School and Harvard School of Public Health. I am the director
and co-founder of the Center on Media and Child Health at
Harvard University.
The first of its kind, the Center on Media and Child Health
is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scientists at
Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and
the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as colleagues
around the country, such as those I am speaking with today, to
work together dedicated to research, education, clinical
implementation, and media production based on the findings
about the effects of media on the physical and mental health of
children and adolescents.
Finally, and most importantly, I am the father of a 16-
year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son.
One hundred years ago, the leading causes of illness and
death in children were infectious diseases and congenital
anomalies. Physicians tried, often unsuccessfully, to cure
those afflicted. More successfully, they, along with public
health workers and other scientists, sought to prevent those
problems by discovering and intervening on the causes, many of
which were found to be environmental--poor sanitation, crowded
housing, and pollution.
Today, with the hygienic infrastructure, antibiotics, and
high-technology prenatal care, diarrhea, pneumonia, and birth
defects are no longer significant causes of morbidity and
mortality in young people. Now the greatest threats to the
health and well-being of children and adolescents are the
outcomes of acquired health-risk behaviors--violence, substance
use, sexual-risk behaviors, and nutritional problems ranging
from obesity to eating disorders.
Surveys that have asked young people where they get their
information on health, lifestyles, and relationships have
consistently found that entertainment media are cited as one of
the leading sources. Just as environmental causes of disease
and death were discovered and addressed a century ago, we must
examine the environment in which our children are developing in
the Information Age to determine the causes of these new
morbidities.
The medical community first voiced concern about the
effects of media on child health in the early 1950s, shortly
after the introduction of television to the general public.
Since that time, media technologies have grown exponentially in
variety, in sophistication, and in the potency of the effects
on their users. Similarly, the level of concern about and
research into media effects has grown. It has been estimated
that there are thousands of research studies conducted by
scientists of public health, psychology, sociology, and
communications to investigate whether there is evidence of
media exposure having an effect on health outcomes.
In approaching any problem of public health, it is
important to deal with it systematically so that key
information is not missed and a complete picture of the disease
process is established. An epidemiologist attempting to
determine the causes and possible solutions for an epidemic
examines the problem through four key aspects of the disease
process:
Exposure. What is the nature and magnitude of the exposure
to the potential causal agent?
Effects. What is the effect of that agent on the exposed
individual?
Mechanism. What is the mechanism by which the causal agent
affects the individual?
And intervention. What interventions can cure or prevent
the negative health outcomes?
Research to date on the effects of entertainment media on
the physical and mental health of children has concentrated
largely on the first two of these areas, exposure and effects.
Through the years, research has shown increasing exposure to
television, movies, electronic games, the Internet, and popular
music.
A nationwide study in 1999, conducted by Dr. Dale Kunkel,
among others, found that American children between 8 and 18
years of age spend 6 hours and 43 minutes of every day exposed
to media, more time than they spend in school, with parents,
or, indeed, engaged in any other activity except sleeping. When
media were used simultaneously--listening to music while
surfing the Internet, for example--were cumulatively
calculated, the amount of media exposure rose to 7 hours and 57
minutes, just under 8 hours a day.
There is little question that young people's level of media
exposure provides ample opportunity for the content of those
media to affect the attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors of young
people. Since we know that children learn even the simplest
skills, such as using a spoon, by observation, imitation, and
adoption of behaviors as their own, what are they learning from
television, movies, popular music, and electronic games?
Effects research has taken a variety of approaches, from
laboratory experiments exposing subjects to various types of
media and observing their responses, to natural experiments
where researchers could study people and their behavior before
and after media were introduced into their environments, to
correlational studies where large populations were studied for
media exposure and subsequent health-related behaviors.
The work of Dr. Joanne Cantor has shown that children are
frightened and traumatized by images they see on the news and
in entertainment programming. This fear appears to be
cumulative and lasting, resulting in what some researchers have
termed ``the mean-world syndrome'' in which the child perceives
the world as a dangerous and frightening place, one in which
only the strong survive.
In my clinical experience, this plays itself out in sleep
disturbance, nightmares, anxiety, depression, and even symptoms
of post-traumatic stress disorder in children as young as four
or five years.
Natural laboratories created when discrete populations have
media introduced for the first time have shown 160 percent
increases in aggression and 50 percent increases in distorted
eating behavior after the introduction of media.
The vast majority of correlational studies done on media
violence have shown a positive association between exposure to
media violence and increases in aggressive attitudes, thoughts,
and behaviors. Children who watched a lot of television when
they were young have been found to be more aggressive years
later as adolescents and adults, whether they are male or
female, and even when such factors as baseline aggressive
tendencies, socioeconomic status, and a variety of parenting
factors are controlled for.
The findings of hundreds of studies analyzed as a whole
have shown that the association between television exposure and
aggressive behavior is stronger than that between calcium
intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom non-
use and sexually acquired HIV, or environmental tobacco smoke
and lung cancer, all associations that clinicians accept as
fact and on which preventive medicine is based without
question.
Despite the preponderance and strength of findings that
associate media exposure with increased aggression, fears, and
desensitization to violence, the mechanism by which media
actually changes those who are exposed remains unclear. Without
a step-by-step understanding of how viewed violence is
translated into perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors, the
media exposure and effects research remains open to criticism.
Convincing as it is to those of us who make the care and
concern for children's health our day-to-day business, there
are well-funded challenges to this research. Just as the
powerful correlational evidence linking tobacco smoke with lung
cancer was challenged until researchers were able to
demonstrate carcinogenic changes on a cellular level in
response to tobacco exposure, research on the effects of media
on health must examine the biological basis for behavioral
change.
Recent advances in medical technology now allow us to
examine the human brain at work. Functional magnetic resonance
imaging, or fMRI, is an advance in neuro-imaging that allows us
to observe the brain in real time to see what areas of the
brain are active in response to various stimuli and how those
responses move from area to area in the brain. In short, we are
now able to visualize the activity of the brain as it processes
and stores information. Coupling these images with our ever-
increasing knowledge of brain architecture and function, we can
construct the pathways by which stimuli are received,
synthesized into ideas, categorized and stored for future
reference--in short, how we learn from our environment.
We are privileged today to have the opportunity to hear
from two pioneers of the new field of media effects neuro-
imaging, Dr. John Murray and Dr. Dan Anderson. I will leave the
detailed description of findings of their pilot studies to
them.
However it must be noted that this work is not isolated to
a small group of scientists examining the effects of media. The
cover story of the February 24, 2003, Newsweek entitled
``Anxiety and Your Brain: How Living With Fear Affects the Mind
and Body'' details the high level of concern held by clinicians
and by the public alike, that we are changed and damaged by the
stress of war, terrorism, and even our entertainment. It
describes how anxiety, even among very young children, has
become the most common chronic illness of modern society, the
effects of which influence every waking moment and pervade
virtually every human interaction.
The response of the human brain to stress, regardless of
its source, is universal and primitive. To quote briefly from
the Newsweek article, quote, ``The fear system's command center
is the amygdala . . . An activated amygdala does not wait
around for instructions from the conscious mind. Once it
perceives a threat, it can trigger a body-wide emergency
response within milliseconds . . . Stress hormones then shut
down non-emergency services, such as digestion and immunity,
and direct the body's resources to fighting or fleeing . . .
creating a state of heightened awareness and supercharging the
circuitry involved in memory formation.''
When we entertain ourselves with scary movies or violent
video games, we are attracted to the heart-pounding super-alert
excitement that these products stimulate. We are activating the
very same primitive survival circuits, the fight-or-flight
pathways in the brain, that allowed our ancestors to survive
sabertooth tigers. However, we also may be paying a long-term
price for this excitement by acquiring deep-seated, primitive,
almost reflexive responses to conflict, responses that may be
playing themselves out years later in physical and mental
stress, desensitization to the suffering of others, and
aggression.
Since 1972, comprehensive reports from the Surgeon General
of the United States and the National Institute of Mental
Health have indicated widespread concern among the public-
health community about the effects of media exposure on our
physical and mental health. In the year 2000, the major health
associations in the United States--the American Medical
Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American
Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry--issued a consensus statement calling
media violence a public health emergency, indicating that the
research evidence pointed, quote, ``overwhelmingly to a causal
connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in
some children.''
Technology and scientific innovations have now given us the
research tools to examine the mechanism of this causation. As a
researcher, a teacher, a pediatrician, and a parent, I urge us
all to support and apply brain-mapping research for the benefit
of our children and our society. I look forward to what we can
learn by better understanding how the human brain responds to
media and by developing interventions to protect us from
negative media influences, completing the last two areas of
epidemiological research needed to characterize and respond to
this public health emergency.
It was not so long ago that, while the tobacco industry
criticized and attempted to debunk scientific minutiae of
various research findings, the medical community and society at
large recognized the serious health effects associated with
smoking and began to intervene. Look at how our personal
attitudes and behaviors, our social environments, and our
public-health awareness have changed for the better.
We are at a similar crossroads in relation to media effects
on health. It is time to be honest with ourselves, to examine
the scientific evidence with all the tools at our disposal, to
acknowledge the risks, and to address them in a serious and
responsible manner. Entertainment media are not inherently
dangerous. They are a powerful tool that must be used
thoughtfully and wisely. Just as the same shovel can be used to
hit someone over the head or to prepare a field for planting,
so, too, media can harm or help. What we teach our children
today will determine not only their long-term health and well-
being, but the world that they create for all of us tomorrow.
It is our task, as parents, as citizens, and as compassionate
people, to do what we can to teach children the lessons that
will help them make their world safe, healthy, and free.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Rich follows:]
Prepared Statement of Michael Rich, M.D., MPH, Center on Media and
Child Health, Children's Hospital Boston
Chairman Brownback, Senator Breaux, Members of the Subcommittee on
Science, Technology and Space, thank you for the opportunity to testify
before you today as a pediatrician, as a child health researcher, as a
media producer, and as a parent. My name is Dr. Michael Rich. I
practice pediatrics and adolescent medicine at Children's Hospital
Boston and teach at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public
Health. I am the director and co-founder of the Center on Media and
Child Health at Harvard University. The first of its kind, the Center
on Media and Child Health is a multidisciplinary collaboration between
scientists at Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health,
and Harvard Graduate School of Education and colleagues around the
country that is dedicated to research, education, clinical
implementation, and media production based on findings about the
effects of media on the physical and mental health of children and
adolescents. Finally, and most importantly, I am the father of a 16-
year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son.
The Effects of Media on Child Health
One hundred years ago, the leading causes of illness and death in
children were infectious diseases and congenital anomalies. Physicians
tried, often unsuccessfully, to cure those afflicted. More
successfully, they, along with public health workers and other
scientists, sought to prevent these problems by discovering and
intervening on the causes--many of which were found to be
environmental--poor sanitation, crowded housing, and pollution. Today,
with a hygienic infrastructure, antibiotics, and high technology
prenatal care, diarrhea, pneumonia, and birth defects are no longer
significant causes of morbidity and mortality in young people. Now the
greatest threats to the health and well-being of children and
adolescents are the outcomes of acquired health risk behaviors--
violence, substance use, sexual risk behaviors, and nutritional
problems from obesity to eating disorders. Surveys that have asked
young people where they get their information on health, lifestyles,
and relationships have consistently found that entertainment media are
cited as one of the leading sources. Just as environmental causes of
disease and death were discovered and addressed a century ago, we must
examine the environment in which children are developing in the
Information Age to determine the causes of the new morbidities.
The medical community first voiced concern about the effects of
media on child health in the early 1950s, shortly after the
introduction of television to the general public. Since that time,
media technologies have grown exponentially, in variety, in
sophistication, and in the potency of their effects on users.
Similarly, the level of concern about and research into media effects
has grown. It has been estimated that there are thousands of research
studies conducted by scientists of public health, psychology,
sociology, and communications to investigate whether there is evidence
of media exposure having an effect on health outcomes.
In approaching any problem of public health, it is important to
deal with it systematically, so that key information is not missed and
a complete picture of the disease process can be established. An
epidemiologist attempting to determine the causes and possible
solutions for an epidemic examines the problem through four key aspects
of the disease process.
1) Exposure--What is the nature and magnitude of the exposure
to a potential causal agent?
2) Effects--What is the effect of that agent on the exposed
individual?
3) Mechanism--What is the mechanism by which the causal agent
affects the individual?
4) Intervention--What interventions can cure or prevent the
negative health outcome?
Research to date on the effects of entertainment media on the
physical and mental health of children has concentrated largely on the
first two of these areas, exposure and effects. Through the years,
research has shown increasing exposure to television, movies,
electronic games, the Internet, and popular music. A nationwide study
in 1999, conducted by Doctor Dale Kunkel among others, found that
American children between 8 and 18 years of age spent 6 hours and 43
minutes of every day exposed to media, more time than they spent in
school, with parents, or, indeed, engaged in any other activity than
sleeping. When media used simultaneously, listening to music while
surfing the internet for example, were cumulatively calculated, the
amount of media exposure rose to 7 hours and 57 minutes, just under
eight hours of every day. There is little question that young people's
level of media exposure provides ample opportunity for the content of
those media to affect the attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors of young
people. Since we know that children learn even the simplest skills,
such as using a spoon, by observation, imitation and adoption of
behaviors as their own, what are they learning from television, movies,
popular music, and electronic games?
Effects research has taken a variety of approaches, from laboratory
experiments exposing subjects to various types of media and observing
their responses, to natural experiments where researchers could study
people and their behavior before and after media were introduced into
their environments, to correlational studies where large populations
were studied for media exposure and subsequent health-related
behaviors. The work of Doctor Joanne Cantor has shown that children are
frightened and traumatized by images they see on the news and in
entertainment programming. This fear appears to be cumulative and
lasting, resulting in what some researchers have termed the ``mean
world syndrome,'' in which the child perceives the world as a dangerous
and frightening place, one in which only the strong survive. In my
clinical experience, this plays itself out in sleep disturbance,
nightmares, anxiety, depression, and even symptoms of post-traumatic
stress disorder in children as young as four or five years. Natural
laboratories created when discrete populations have media introduced
for the first time have shown 160 percent increases in aggression and
50 percent increases in disordered eating behavior after the
introduction of media. The vast majority of the correlational studies
done on media violence have shown a positive association between
exposure to media violence and increases in aggressive attitudes,
thoughts, and behaviors. Children who watched a lot of television when
they were young have been found to be more aggressive years later as
adolescents and adults, whether they are male or female, even when such
factors as baseline aggressive tendencies, socioeconomic status, and a
variety of parenting factors are controlled for. The findings of
hundreds of studies, analyzed as a whole, have shown that the
association between television exposure and aggressive behavior is
stronger than that of calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and
lower IQ, condom nonuse and sexually acquired HIV, or environmental
tobacco smoke and lung cancer--all associations that clinicians accept
as fact and on which preventive medicine is based without question.
Despite the preponderance and strength of findings that associate
media exposure with increased aggression, fears, and desensitization to
violence, the mechanism by which media actually changes those who are
exposed remains unclear. Without a step-by-step understanding of how
viewed violence is translated into perceptions, attitudes, and
behaviors, the media exposure and effects research remains open to
criticism. Convincing as it is to those of us who make care and concern
for children's health our day-to-day business, there are well-funded
challenges to this research. Just as the powerful correlational
evidence linking tobacco smoke with lung cancer was challenged until
researchers were able to demonstrate carcinogenic changes on a cellular
level in response to tobacco exposure, research on the effects of media
on health must examine the biological basis for behavioral change.
Recent advances in medical technology now allow us to examine the human
brain at work. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is an
advance in neuroimaging that allows us to observe the brain in real
time, to see what areas of the brain are active in response to various
stimuli and how those responses move from area to area in the brain. In
short, we are now able to visualize the activity of the brain as it
processes and stores information. Coupling these images with our ever-
increasing knowledge of brain architecture and function, we can
construct the pathways by which stimuli are received, synthesized into
ideas, categorized, and stored for future reference--in short, how we
learn from our environment.
We are privileged today to have the opportunity to hear from two
pioneers of the new field of media effects neuroimaging, Doctor John
Murray and Doctor Dan Anderson. I will leave the detailed description
and findings of their pilot studies to them. However, it must be noted
that this work is not isolated to a small group of scientists examining
the effects of media. The cover story of the February 24, 2003 Newsweek
entitled, ``Anxiety and Your Brain: How Living with Fear Affects the
Mind and the Body,'' details the high level of concern held by
clinicians and the public alike that we are changed and damaged by the
stress of war, terrorism, and even our entertainment. It describes how
anxiety, even among very young children, has become the most common
chronic illness of modern society, the effects of which influence every
waking moment and pervade virtually every human interaction. The
response of the human brain to stress, regardless of its source, is
universal and primitive. To quote briefly from the Newsweek article,
``The fear system's command center is the amygdala . . . An activated
amygdala doesn't wait around for instructions from the conscious mind.
Once it perceives a threat, it can trigger a body-wide emergency
response within milliseconds . . . stress hormones then shut down
nonemergency services such as digestion and immunity, and direct the
body's resources to fighting or fleeing . . . creating a state of
heightened alertness and supercharging the circuitry involved in memory
formation.'' When we entertain ourselves with scary movies or violent
video games, we are attracted to the heart-pounding, super-alert
excitement that these products stimulate. We are activating the very
same primitive survival circuits, the ``fight or flight'' pathways in
the brain, that allowed our ancestors to survive saber-toothed tigers.
However, we may also be paying a long-term price for this excitement by
acquiring deep-seated, primitive, almost-reflexive responses to
conflict, responses that may be playing themselves out years later in
physical and mental stress, fears, desensitization to the suffering of
others, and aggression.
Since 1972, comprehensive reports from the Surgeon General of the
United States and the National Institute of Mental Health have
indicated widespread concern among the public health community about
the effects of media exposure on our physical and mental health. In the
year 2000, the major health organizations of the United States, the
American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the
American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry, issued a consensus statement calling media
violence a public health emergency, indicating that the research
evidence pointed ``overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media
violence and aggressive behavior in some children.'' Technology and
scientific innovations have now given us the research tools to examine
the mechanism of this causation. As a researcher, teacher,
pediatrician, and parent, I urge us all to support and apply brain-
mapping research for the benefit of our children and our society. I
look forward to what we can learn by better understanding how the human
brain responds to media and by developing interventions to protect us
from negative media influences, completing the last two areas of
epidemiological research needed to characterize and respond to this
public health emergency.
It was not so long ago that while the tobacco industry criticized
and attempted to debunk scientific minutiae of various research
findings, the medical community and society at large recognized the
serious health risks associated with smoking and began to intervene.
Look at how our personal attitudes and behaviors, our social
environments and our public health awareness have changed for the
better. We are at a similar crossroads in relation to media effects on
health. It is time to be honest with ourselves, examine the scientific
evidence with all the tools at our disposal, acknowledge the risks, and
address them in a serious and responsible manner. Entertainment media
are not inherently dangerous. They are a powerful tool that must be
used thoughtfully and wisely. Just as the same shovel can be used to
hit someone over the head or to prepare a field for planting, so, too,
media can harm or help. What we teach our children today will determine
not only their long-term health and well-being, but the world they
create for all of us tomorrow. It is our task, as parents, as citizens,
and as compassionate people, to do what we can to teach our children
the lessons that will help them make their world safe, healthy, and
free.
Senator Brownback. That was an excellent statement, Dr.
Rich. I would note that over the years that you and I have been
working on this, and you have been in and testified, that each
step along the way gets clearer and clearer about what is
taking place here. I am hopeful we can make that message clear,
as well, across into the industry.
Dr. Kunkel, thank you very much for joining us today, and I
look forward to your testimony.
STATEMENT OF DR. DALE KUNKEL, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA
BARBARA
Dr. Kunkel. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman.
With the help of a number of fine colleagues, including
several who are here with us today, I have conducted extensive
research on media content and effects over the years
emphasizing the study of both violence and sex in mainstream
television programming. In my remarks today, I am going to
briefly review some key issues in these areas and then offer
comments about the implications that they hold for the pursuit
of neurological investigations for the further study of media
effects.
First, it is well established by a compelling body of
scientific evidence that television violence poses a risk of
harmful effects for children. While exposure to media violence
is not necessarily the most potent factor that contributes to
real-world violence and aggression, it may well be the most
pervasive. Millions of children watch 20 or more hours per week
of programming that, on average, contains violence, and this
cumulative exposure to violent images can shape young minds in
unhealthy ways.
My particular research interest has emphasized the
importance of examining differences in the ways in which
violence is presented on television and the implications that
such differences hold for the effects of that violent material.
The most important finding across this entire program of
research is rather simple. Not all violence is the same, in
terms of its risk of harmful effects on children. The nature
and context of the portrayal matters. This idea is best
conveyed by offering some examples.
First, consider a violent act that has the following
features. One, it is committed by a repugnant character who no
one would wish to emulate. Two, it clearly depicts the harms
suffered by victims. And, three, it results in clear and strong
negative consequences for the perpetrator. This type of
portrayal would actually minimize the risk of most harmful
effects for children, because it does not glamorize or sanitize
its depiction of violence.
In contrast, consider an alternative example. In this
portrayal, one, violence is committed by an attractive or
popular character who is a potential role model for children.
Two, the scene depicts unrealistically mild harm to the victim
without presenting any pain cues. And, three, the use of
violence conveys power and status for the perpetrator or
attracts the approval of others in the program. This example,
by glamorizing and sanitizing the depiction of violent
behavior, has a much stronger risk of leading to harmful
outcomes in child viewers.
Research conducted by myself and colleagues at UC Santa
Barbara as part of the National Television Violence Study
documents an unfortunate trend in the context surrounding most
violent depictions on TV. Our final report for that project,
which was based on the analysis of roughly 10,000 programs that
were sampled across three television seasons, concluded that
the manner in which most violence is presented on television
actually enhances, rather than diminishes, its risk of harmful
effects on children.
More specifically, we found that most violent portrayals on
television do not show a realistic degree of harm for victims,
do not show the pain and suffering realistically associated
with violent attacks, and do not show the serious long-term
negative consequences of violence. These patterns were found in
a large majority of violent portrayals across all channels and
at all times of day. In contrast, programs that include a
strong anti-violence theme accounted for less than four percent
of all shows that contained violent content.
These data are troubling, but they are not new. I mention
them here today for two purposes. First, they serve to
underscore that the way in which most violence is depicted on
television does, indeed, pose a serious risk of harm for our
children. But, second, and speaking more directly now to the
focus of today's hearing, these data provide a potential avenue
for exploration by researchers examining the neurological
activity that occurs when humans view televised violence.
Given the knowledge we already possess about the varying
risks of harm associated with different types of violent
depictions, it seems clear that neurobiological researchers
will need to employ many different types of violent stimuli as
part of their experimental work. We cannot assume that the way
the mind reacts to one type of violent portrayal will be the
same as for all types of violent depictions. Indeed, given our
current state of knowledge, there is substantial reason to
expect that would not be the case.
This underscores the need for a substantial program of
research to adequately explore the full range of differences in
the depictions of violent behavior. I am testifying ahead of
Dr. Murray, but when he presents his perspective on this issue
in his existing studies, you will see that he is already saying
that we need to go to different types of subjects. My point is
that we need to go to different types of portrayals of violence
to understand the way in which the mind is making sense of
violent portrayals.
Finally, I should note that Dr. Murray's initial brain-
mapping research suggests that cortical arousal is an important
aspect of how the mind reacts to violent images. This is
important, because heightened arousal levels are associated
with a heightened probability of behavioral effects from media
exposure.
It will be interesting to learn the extent to which
sexually-related material on TV may also stimulate cortical
arousal. Should that be the case, then we would also have
reason to expect an increased probability of exposure effects
in that realm of media content, as well.
In sum, we know a great deal about the effects of media,
but we still have much to learn. I encourage this Committee to
take every step possible to support research that will further
our knowledge about how the mind is influenced by media
portrayals.
Children today spend more time with media than they do in
the classroom, yet the number of Federal dollars devoted to
educational research literally dwarfs that which is invested in
any media-effects investigation. The stakes are too high for us
to miss any opportunity to better understand the impact of
media on children.
Thank you very much for your time and your attention to
this important issue.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Kunkel follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Dale Kunkel, University of California,
Santa Barbara
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on the prospects for
new and important research knowledge about media effects that may be
derived from the use of neurological investigations, or so-called
``brain mapping'' technology. I have conducted extensive research on
media content and effects over the past 20 years, emphasizing the study
of violent and sexually-related images found in mainstream television
programming. More specifically, I served as a senior researcher from
1994-1998 on the National Television Violence Study, one of the largest
media research projects to date--and I have also conducted an ongoing
series of content analysis investigations entitled ``Sex on TV''
sponsored by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation over the past six
years. Each of these topic areas have important linkages to the new
research approach being pioneered by Dr. Murray, and I would like to
comment on those linkages after first providing some background
regarding the existing state of media violence research.
Media Violence: The Importance of Context
Concern on the part of the public and Congress about the harmful
influence of media violence and other sensitive material on children
dates back to the 1950s and 1960s. The legitimacy of that concern is
corroborated by extensive scientific research that has accumulated
since that time. Indeed, in reviewing the totality of empirical
evidence regarding the impact of media violence, the conclusion that
exposure to violent portrayals poses a risk of harmful effects on
children has been reached by the U.S. Surgeon General, the National
Institutes of Mental Health, the National Academy of Sciences, the
American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association,
the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a host of other scientific and
public health agencies and organizations.
In sum, it is well established by a compelling body of scientific
evidence that television violence poses a risk of harmful effects for
child-viewers. While exposure to media violence is not necessarily the
most potent factor contributing to real world violence and aggression
in the United States today, it is certainly the most pervasive.
Millions of children spend an average of 20 or more hours per week
watching television, and this cumulative exposure to violent images can
shape young minds in unhealthy ways.
Much of my research has emphasized the importance of examining
differences in the ways in which violence is presented on television,
and the implications such differences hold for the effects that result
from viewing violent material. Simply put, not all violence is the same
in terms of its risk of harmful effects on child-viewers. The nature
and context of the portrayal matters. For example, consider a violent
act that has the following features:
--it is committed by a repugnant character who no one would
wish to emulate;
--it clearly depicts the harms suffered by victims;
--and it results in strong negative consequences for the
perpetrator.
This would be the type of portrayal that would actually minimize
the risk of most harmful effects for viewers, because it does not
glamorize or sanitize its depiction of violence. In contrast, consider
another type of violent portrayal;
--one that is committed by an attractive or popular character
who is a potential role model for children;
--that depicts unrealistically mild harm to the victim who is
attacked,
--and that conveys power and status for the perpetrator or
attracts the approval of others in the program.
This type of portrayal, by glamorizing and sanitizing the depiction
of violent behavior, has a much stronger risk of leading to harmful
outcomes in the viewer.
Research conducted by myself and colleagues at UC Santa Barbara as
part of the National Television Violence Study documents an unfortunate
trend in the context surrounding most violent depictions on TV. Our
final report, which was based on the analysis of approximately 10,000
programs across three television seasons, concluded that the manner in
which most violence is presented on television actually enhances rather
than diminishes its risk of harmful effects on child-viewers. That is,
the most common pattern associated with violent portrayals on TV
involved contextual features such as:
--not showing a realistic degree of harm for victims;
--not showing the pain and suffering realistically associated
with violence attacks;
--and not showing the serious long-term negative consequences
of violence.
These patterns were present in the large majority of violent
portrayals across all channels, and at all times of day. In contrast,
programs that included a strong anti-violence theme accounted for less
than 4 percent of all shows containing violent content.
Implications of the Findings
These data are troubling, though they are not new. I mention them
here today for two purposes. First, they serve to underscore that the
way in which most violence is depicted on television poses a serious
risk of harm for children. It does not have to be that way. Independent
of whether or not violence on television might be reduced in quantity,
it could certainly be presented in more responsible fashion, thereby
diminishing its risk to child viewers. This is an avenue for addressing
the concern about media violence that, in my view, has not yet been
adequately explored.
But second, and now speaking more directly to the focus of today's
hearing, these data provide a potentially fruitful avenue for further
exploration by researchers who examine the neurological activity that
occurs when humans view televised violence. In a moment, Dr. Murray
will review his brain mapping research, which holds strong promise for
furthering our understanding of how the mind makes sense of violent
images on the screen. Given the evidence we already possess about the
varying risk of harms associated with differing types of violent
portrayals, it seems clear that it will be important for
neurobiological researchers to employ many different types of violent
stimuli as part of their experimental work. We cannot assume that the
way the mind reacts to one type of violent portrayal will be the same
for all types of violent depictions; indeed, given our current state of
knowledge, there is strong reason to expect that it will not. This
factor underscores the need for a substantial program of research to
adequately explore the full range of differences in the depictions of
violent behavior.
Finally, I should note that Dr. Murray's initial brain-mapping
research suggests that cortical arousal is an important aspect of how
the mind reacts to violent images, which is important because
heightened arousal levels are associated with a heightened probability
of behavioral effects from media exposure. It will also be important to
learn the extent to which sexually-related material on television may
stimulate cortical arousal. Should that be the case, these findings
would also hold similar implications for an increased probability of
exposure effects in this realm.
In sum, we know a great deal about the effects of media, but we
still have much to learn. I encourage this Committee to take every step
possible to support research in this area that will further our
knowledge about how the mind is influenced by media portrayals.
Children spend more time with media than they do in the classroom,
yet I the number of federal dollars spent on educational research today
literally dwarfs that which is devoted to media effects investigations.
The stakes are too high for us to miss any opportunity to better
understand the impact of media on children. Thank you for your time and
for your attention to this important issue.
Senator Brownback. Thank you, Dr. Kunkel. That last point
was an excellent one. People spend so much time with
entertainment, and yet we spend very few dollars on researching
its actual impact, and we do millions, if not billions of
dollars worth of research on educational impact. It is an
excellent point.
Dr. Kunkel. That is important, too, but we cannot forget
about this area.
Senator Brownback. Agreed.
Dr. Cantor, thank you for joining us today.
STATEMENT OF JOANNE CANTOR, Ph.D., PROFESSOR EMERITA,
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
Dr. Cantor. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you for inviting
me to present my views on the media's impact on children.
Since 1974, I have been a professor at the University of
Wisconsin focusing the greater part of my research on the
impact of media violence on children's aggressive behaviors and
emotional health. My book, ``Mommy, I'm Scared: How TV and
Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them,''
helps parents shield their children from the effects of media
violence. Finally, and not the least important in terms of
expertise, I am the mother of a 14-year-old son.
We know a lot about the effects of media violence. Study
after study has found that children often behave more violently
after watching media violence. The violence they engage in
ranges from trivial aggressive play to injurious behavior with
serious medical consequences. Children also show higher levels
of hostility after viewing violence. And the effects of this
hostility range from being in a nasty mood to an increased
tendency to interpret a neutral comment or action as an attack.
In addition, children can be desensitized by media violence,
becoming less distressed by real violence and less sympathetic
with victims. Finally, media violence makes children fearful,
and these effects range from a general sense that the world is
dangerous to full-blown anxieties, nightmares, sleep
disturbances, or other trauma symptoms.
Even more alarming, research confirms that these effects
are long-lasting. You talked about a study from the University
of Michigan which showed that viewing violence between the ages
of 6 and 10 predicts antisocial behavior as a young adult.
Another aspect of that study showed that those who were heavy
viewers when they were young were twice as likely as the others
to engage in spousal abuse when they became adults. And, as you
said, this analysis controlled for many of the other factors
that we know also lead to antisocial behavior.
The long-term effects of media on fears and anxieties are
also striking. Research shows that intensely violent images
often induce anxieties that linger, interfering with sleeping
and waking activities for years. Many young adults report that
frightening media images that they saw as children have
remained on their minds in spite of their repeated attempts to
get rid of them. They also report feeling intense anxieties in
non-threatening situations as a result of having been scared by
a movie or television program, even though they now know that
there is nothing to fear. As an example, you might find it
logical that many people who have seen the movie ``Jaws'' worry
about encountering a shark whenever they swim in the ocean. But
you would be surprised to learn how many of these people are
also still uncomfortable about swimming in lakes or pools
because of the enduring emotional memory of the terror they
experienced viewing this movie as a child.
Senator Brownback. That is where that comes from.
[Laughter.]
Dr. Cantor. These long-term reactions of increased
aggressiveness and lingering fear raise important questions
about the processes involved in these media effects. The fact
that a child might imitate a wrestling move he has just seen on
TV is not that surprising. Nor is it difficult to explain why a
youngster might have a nightmare the night after watching
``Psycho'' or ``Poltergeist'' or ``Scream.'' But the fact that
the negative effects of media violence are so enduring
indicates that we need to explore these processes more deeply.
We need to know what is happening to children's brains as they
watch media violence and what kind of lasting changes occur.
Some encouraging findings are beginning to emerge from
research teams headed by John Murray at Kansas State University
and also by Vincent Matthews at Indiana University Medical
School, with funding from the Center for Successful Parenting.
By mapping the areas of the brain that are influenced by
violent images, these studies promise to help us understand how
media violence promotes aggression and to help explain why it
has such enduring effects on emotional memory.
What can Government do about the problem of media violence?
Well, you have already helped by mandating the V-chip and
providing TV ratings. This is an enormous first step. However,
there is evidence that the ratings need improvement, and
certainly the publicity for the ratings needs to be improved.
Also, Congress has conducted hearings into the media
industries' aggressive marketing of violence to children. This
has led to some improvements. But, again, Congress needs to
keep tabs on this, because it is so very important.
Congressional hearings have also had a positive effect by
keeping the issue of media violence in the news and helping
educate parents about the risks of media violence. Anything
more that can be done to educate parents would certainly
provide enormous benefits.
And, finally, Congress can provide funding for more
research on this topic, especially research on the neurobiology
of brain reactions and on the relationship between media
violence exposure and children's mental and physical health.
We must not lose sight of the stakes here. A great deal has
changed in the past generation or two. Our children are
spending much more time with media than we did, and what they
are exposed to is more violent, more graphic, and now, with
video and computer games, more interactive than we ever
imagined. Our children's heavy immersion in today's media
culture is a large-scale societal experiment with potentially
horrifying results. And, unfortunately, with hardly a child
left behind to serve in the control condition.
The time is now to put serious resources into understanding
what we are doing to our children and into finding ways to
ensure their welfare and that of society as a whole. I have
talked about these ideas in more detail, and I have put a lot
of information on my Web site, which is www.joannecantor.com,
which anybody can access, because I think it is so important to
get this message out. The media are not going to help us very
much in getting these messages out, so the Internet can have a
very positive effect in informing parents and other people.
I will be happy to answer any of your questions, but I
would like to thank you again for your sincere and continuing
interest in this matter.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Cantor follows:]
Prepared Statement of Joanne Cantor, Ph.D., Professor Emerita,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for
inviting me to present my views on the media's impact on children.
Since 1974, I have been a professor at the University of Wisconsin,
focusing the greater part of my research on the impact of media
violence on children's aggressive behaviors and emotional health. My
book, ``Mommy I'm Scared'': How TV and Movies Frighten Children and
What We Can Do to Protect Them, helps parents protect their children
from the effects of media violence. Finally, and not the least
important in terms of expertise, I am the mother of a fourteen-year-old
son.
We now know a lot about the effects of media violence. Study after
study has found that children often behave more violently after
watching media violence. The violence they engage in ranges from
trivial aggressive play to injurious behavior with serious medical
consequences. Children also show higher levels of hostility after
viewing violence, and the effects of this hostility range from being in
a nasty mood to an increased tendency to interpret a neutral comment or
action as an attack. In addition, children can be desensitized by media
violence, becoming less distressed by real violence and less likely to
sympathize with victims. Finally, media violence makes children
fearful, and these effects range from a general sense that the world is
dangerous, to full-blown anxieties, nightmares, sleep disturbances, and
other trauma symptoms.
The evidence about these effects of media violence has accumulated
over the last few decades. Meta-analyses, which statistically combine
all the findings in a particular area, demonstrate that there is a
consensus on the negative effects of media violence. They also show
that the effects are strong--stronger than the well-known relationship
between children's exposure to lead and low I.Q. scores, for example.
These effects cannot be ignored as inconclusive or inconsequential.
Even more alarming, recent research confirms that these effects are
long lasting. A study from the University of Michigan shows that TV
viewing between the ages of 6 and 10 predicts antisocial behavior as a
young adult. In this study, both males and females who were heavy TV-
violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to engage
in serious physical aggression and criminal behavior later in life; in
addition, the heavy violence viewers were twice as likely as the others
to engage in spousal abuse when they became adults. This analysis
controlled for other potential contributors to antisocial behavior,
including socioeconomic status and parenting practices.
The long-term effects of media on fears and anxieties are also
striking. Research shows that intensely violent images often induce
anxieties that linger, interfering with both sleeping and waking
activities for years. Many young adults report that frightening media
images that they saw as children have remained on their minds in spite
of their repeated attempts to get rid of them. They also report feeling
intense anxieties in nonthreatening situations as a result of having
been scared by a movie or television program--even though they now know
that there is nothing to fear. [For example, you might find it logical
that many people who have seen the movie Jaws worry about encountering
a shark whenever they swim in the ocean. But you would be surprised to
learn how many of these people are still uncomfortable swimming in
lakes or pools because of the enduring emotional memory of the terror
they experienced viewing this movie as a child.]
These long-term reactions of increased aggressiveness and lingering
fear raise important questions about the processes involved in media
effects. The fact that a child might imitate a wrestling move he has
just seen on TV is not that surprising. Nor is it difficult to explain
why a youngster might have a nightmare after watching Psycho or
Poltergeist or Scream. But the fact that the negative effects of media
violence are so enduring indicates that we need to explore these
processes more deeply. We need to know what's happening to children's
brains as they watch media violence and what kinds of lasting changes
occur.
Some encouraging findings are beginning to emerge from research
teams headed by Vincent Matthews at Indiana University Medical School
and by John Murray at Kansas State University. By mapping the areas of
the brain that are influenced by violent images, these studies promise
to help us understand how media violence promotes aggression and to
help explain why they have such enduring effects on emotional memory.
What can government do about the problem of media violence?
Congress has already provided help by mandating the V-chip and TV
ratings so that parents can have some idea of what's in a program
before their child watches it. This is an enormous first step, but
currently each mass medium--TV, movies, music, and video games--has its
own distinct rating system. Parents need better information, and they
would certainly benefit from having one easily understood rating system
that would apply to all media.
Congress has already conducted hearings regarding the media
industries' aggressive marketing of violent programming to children.
These hearings have resulted in many promises on the part of industry
executives and some movement in the direction of curbing these
excesses. But Congress should continue to keep tabs on these
activities.
Congressional hearings have also had a positive effect by keeping
the issue of media violence in the news and helping to educate parents
about the potential risks of media to their children. Anything else the
government can do to help educate parents on this matter would provide
enormous benefits.
What Congress can do in addition is provide funding for more
research on this topic--especially research on the neurobiology of
brain reactions and on the relationship between media violence exposure
and children's mental and physical health.
We must not lose sight of the stakes here. A great deal has changed
in the past generation or two. Our children are spending much more time
with media than we did, and what they are exposed to is much more
violent, more graphic, and now, with video games and computers, more
interactive than we ever imagined. Our children's heavy immersion in
today's media culture is a large-scale societal experiment with
potentially horrifying results (and with hardly a child left behind to
serve in the control condition). The time is now to put serious
resources into understanding what we are doing to our children and into
finding ways to ensure their welfare and that of society as a whole.
You can find these ideas and arguments in more detail on my web
site www.joannecantor.com. Of course, I will be happy to answer your
questions. Thank you again for your sincere and continuing interest in
this matter.
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Senator Brownback. Thank you.
The Congress has had an interest in this issue for a long
period of time, and we have had hearings that go back to a
colleague from Illinois, Senator Simon, who held hearings on
this for a number of years. In fact, I saw him at Paul
Wellstone's funeral and we talked about this topic. It has been
an area of focus for some period of time, much like the tobacco
health issue. It was a subject of focus for years, and people
would get up in the morning coughing, and they knew something
was not quite right, but we did not have the ``smoking gun.''
But that is what we are, hopefully, moving towards here on this
issue.
Let me ask, anybody on the panel that would want to refer
to this: there has been a great deal of frustration about not
just the level of violent and sexual material over the years--
and we have heard this repeatedly--but also the escalation of
the violent and sexual material in movies or other
entertainment venues, and now there is even the crossing of
violence and sexual materials so that you have violent sexual
content that is very pernicious. With this new brain-mapping
type of work, can you speculate as to why the entertainment
industry is so dependent upon violent and sexual material? Is
it because they have to hit certain arousal spots in the brain
to keep you watching, and you have to get a heavier and heavier
dose to keep you interested?
Dr. Kunkel. I think the question may be better directed to
the second panel, where we have the people who are actually
doing that work. But I would venture one comment, and that is,
a close colleague of mine, Dr. Edward Donnerstein, is one of
the leading researchers who has looked at exactly the nexus you
are referencing here, the combination of sex and violence. It
turns out that that type of portrayal has the most powerful
risk of effects, because each of them brings some potential for
arousal. And we have known this before we have had brain-
mapping technology through----
Senator Brownback. In different areas of the brain.
Dr. Kunkel.--other measures. Yes. And so once you have an
arousal state, it creates, in humans, a greater readiness to
respond, and you will then have a greater readiness to respond
to whatever input you are receiving at that time. And so it
will be very interesting, as I suggested, it could be quite
fruitful to look at sexual material as well as violent material
through this brain-mapping technology. Of course, one would not
do it with young children, but it would be very interesting to
look at content that includes both aspects, both elements of
content to see what are the variations in the way the brain
responds.
Michael, did you want to comment further?
Dr. Rich. Yes, I had two comments, one being based on the
research and one clinical. There is a small body of research
that has looked at this nexus between sexual and violent
material, and other pleasurable material combined with that
violent material, and it finds that this violent material is
the most potent because it is associating pleasure with
violence. So that if you are making people laugh or you are
sexually arousing them at the same time as violence is
portrayed, those two feelings get meshed together and get
cemented into the long-term memory as a mixed feeling of
pleasure with causing pain.
Secondly, on a clinical level, I see with the increasing
amount of sexual violence portrayed, increasing amount of
sexual violence in the children that I take care of, the
adolescents. I am hearing more about dating violence. I am
hearing more about date rape. I am hearing more about coercive
sexual activity, the threat of violence or the threat of some
sort of physical harm related to violence. So this is purely
empirical evidence, not as a result of research. But as a
clinician, this concerns me, because I think that when we
portray that it is normal or that it is okay for someone to
demand sex ``or else,'' we are teaching them that. And just as
they learn to use the spoon, they will learn to do this in
their lives as well.
Senator Brownback. Dr. Cantor?
Dr. Cantor. And to your question about why the industry is
going so often into these two directions----
Senator Brownback. Yes.
Dr. Cantor.--there is quite a bit of evidence of
desensitization, so that if you have one murder in ``Terminator
I'', you have to have ten in ``Terminator II'' to get the same
level of emotional reaction. And I am sure that brain mapping
will reaffirm this. So we are desensitizing kids so that, to
get the same sort of ``buzz'' or thrill, they have to go up
another notch. And so that is one reason why they are going in
that direction, I believe.
Also, I study long-term memories that adults have of
exposure to something really disturbing when they were a child.
I recently published a study on memories of stumbling into
something sexual on television. And there are a subset of kids
who stumbled into sexual violence on television as a child who
keep that memory and are very troubled by both what might be
considered normal sexual activities and violent activities
because those memories of sexual violence are so indelible in
these kids' minds. So it is very important to make sure parents
understand the consequences of unlimited exposure to television
by their kids.
Senator Brownback. How old are those memories that you are
dealing with?
Dr. Cantor. Well, they could be from age 5, from age 10.
And these are young adults talking about these vivid memories
of something that they saw that long ago.
Senator Brownback. So it got burned into the brain.
Dr. Cantor. It got burned in there indelibly, and they can
write about it in great detail. And if they talk about it out
loud, you can hear in their voice that the emotion is
returning. So these are not things that go away.
Senator Brownback. Do we know what has gone on in the brain
to burn that into the brain that hard?
Dr. Cantor. Well, I think maybe you should ask the next
panel----
Senator Brownback. All right.
Dr. Cantor.--but I think that is one of the things that
they are going for in this research.
Senator Brownback. Dr. Kunkel, do we know for certain--
because you do a lot of studies of what is being put out in the
entertainment industry--do we know for certain that the level,
the type of violence, the type of sexual material has ratcheted
up in quantity and quality over the past, say, 20 years?
Dr. Kunkel. I want to address your question at more than
just a straightforward level, because for so long people have
asked the question, ``Is there more violence on television than
there used to be?'' And that is not the right question to ask.
And I think you are headed in the direction of the questions
that we need to get to. If you are going to ask is there more
violence on television, you have got to count things, and you
have got to say, well, this is an act, and so what is an
average number of acts per hour or per program. And so you
could make comparisons over time, but that equates all acts of
violence as being the same. And the whole key to the base of
evidence that we have from the content studies is that that is
not the case. We are linking the content research to
experimental lab studies that show variation in how children
respond to these portrayals. And what we find, that I think is
the key answer to your question here, is that we know there are
certain contextual features that enhance the risk of harmful
effects. We analyze the violence on television for the presence
or absence of those. And what we find is that all of the
contextual features that are most common in the portrayals of
violence on mainstream television are those that heighten the
risk.
Now, this is interesting, because it suggests that there
are several ways in which the media, if it were going to be
more socially responsible to address this concern, could
proceed. One, and the obvious one that people have known for a
long time, is you could simply reduce the amount of violence on
television. But I have been to discussions with the industry,
and they often say, ``Violence is an integral part of life. We
cannot take it away from all drama. It would be silly and
Pollyannaish to do so, so just accept that there must be some
violence.'' And I say, ``Okay, I can accept that, but cannot I
ask you to present it in a way that would diminish its risk of
harm? Can I not ask you to show it with the punishments and the
negative consequences and the pain and suffering?'' Because it
is the sanitization and the glamorization of violence that
increases that risk. In an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, when
someone is thrown out of the fourth story of a building in a
fall that would obviously kill any human, you have actors get
up, shrug it off, and walk back in to continue the battle. The
viewer, especially the young-child viewer, takes the lesson
from that that when you engage in some serious violence like
that, it does not have the repercussions that it really does in
the real world. And you often hear this in real-world scenarios
where kids have engaged in violence and something happens. They
say, ``Gee, I didn't know it was going to be like that in real
life.''
So the answer is a complex one. It is more than the amount
of violence; it is the way in which violence is presented. And
that, of course, poses some challenges for the ratings system.
Senator Brownback. Well, then take your question the way
you have framed it. Are we seeing more violence portrayed in a
way to stimulate arousal now than we were 20 years ago? Maybe
that is still not quite framed right. I know there is a
difference between what context the violence is placed in.
Dr. Kunkel. Uh-huh.
Senator Brownback. In the hearings that I have had over the
years I have been here, people have talked about the contextual
violence, for example the violence you see in a war movie such
as Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List, is far different
from the gratuitous violence that is pleasurable that you see
in another place. In behavioral studies, they are saying this
latter form has a very pernicious impact, and the former does
not. Now, we would not know yet in the brain-mapping studies,
because we are not that far along.
But in these more difficult areas of violence, the
pleasurable violence, are we seeing more of that in the
entertainment industries over the last 20 years?
Dr. Kunkel. We do not have data as old as 20 years, because
at that point in time we were not clear on all of these
variables. But we do know, from looking in recent years, going
back to the mid-1990s, that the portrayals of violence commonly
include these high-risk factors. One of the most troubling
areas of findings is that programming intended for children,
children's cartoon programming, it is not realistic and
graphic, but it, nonetheless, has many high-risk features,
because the violence is perpetrated by attractive characters,
has a number of other features that actually make it very
worrisome. Again, the industry will say, ``Oh, well, that's not
realistic violence, and so we're not worried about that. That
doesn't trouble us.'' From the perspective of a young child,
all television is realistic. They think the commercials occur
to give the actors a rest. And so cartoon violence is a serious
concern for young children. It is very, very compelling
evidence from the content studies that the context surrounding
the violent portrayals enhances its risk of harmful effects
just about as much as you possibly could if you were trying to.
Senator Brownback. Dr. Cantor?
Dr. Cantor. If I could just amplify on that, what Professor
Kunkel is talking about, in terms of harms. He is talking about
the harms of increasing violent behavior. But different
contextual features increase the possibility of fears and
anxieties. And, certainly, we know that movies and television
programs have become more graphic and provide more scary images
than they did 20 or 30 years ago, and those harms are
different.
So, when we say that certain contextual features are the
most harmful in terms of making kids more aggressive, there are
a different set of features that are likely to cause them to
have nightmares. And it is clear that movies, particularly,
over the years have become much more graphic and much more
horrifying. And in general, kids' anxiety levels have increased
dramatically over the past 40 years.
Senator Brownback. You all have been supportive, I believe,
in your statements for more research, particularly in the field
of brain-mapping so that we can find out what is going on in
the head. We have a lot of behavioral studies. We could of
course still use some more support there. But I would like to
see more about what is going on in the mind while watching
various types of movies. I think Dr. Kunkel, you mentioned that
you would like to see interplay of movies with different
contextual subjects.
What would we learn if every movie that came out had some
form of brain-mapping study before it was released so that we
knew, here is the activity that is going on, here is what is
being stimulated, at least in a small section? With virtually
all movies, the industry does--I think in all of them--
marketing studies well in advance, as well as screening the
movie targeted to age groups to see the response. What would we
learn from that sort of broad-based type of information?
Dr. Rich. I think it would be extraordinarily hard to do. I
mean, these studies, as you will hear, are very difficult to do
in terms of the amount of technology and technicians necessary,
in terms of simply making a child sit still for that long, if
anybody has ever tried to make a child sit still, for any
reason, let alone one where a movement of a millimeter is going
to basically obscure your results.
So I think it is an unrealistic hope to do it with every
single movie. What I do think could be done is some kind of
monitoring, sort of quality assurance, you know, with
individual movies, sort of like they do not inspect every piece
of beef that goes through; they inspect randomly every tenth or
seventh or whatever. And I think that that may be possible.
But I think before any of that occurs, we need to know what
it is we are seeing. We need to do the basic research of
understanding these mechanisms, where does the brain go with
this type of material versus that type of material, before we
can determine what is dangerous. Is it the amygdala? Is that
where the action is? Or are there other factors that mediate
that in various ways?
So I think that one of the things that we can do is
extrapolating from these brain-mapping studies features of
these media that tend to push kids' brains into directions that
are harmful for them and then use that material to help create
a more scientifically rigorous and objective ratings system,
whereby we can recognize those features in movies and
television and video games and rate them accordingly.
Senator Brownback. Maybe you will not want to comment on
this, but will we be able to find in some of the brain-mapping
work, do you think, long-lasting markers in the brain from
entertainment violence? Dr. Cantor has talked about, years
later, people bring up vivid images of things they have seen
years earlier. Are we going to be able to find that, or is this
just way too early to tell in this research field?
Dr. Cantor. Well, I do not know how far technology is going
to progress. I mean, certainly it has progressed very far. And
I would yield to my colleagues on the next panel for a more
definitive answer. But it seems very clear that changes occur
in the brain as a function of traumatic reactions, and those
changes are considered indelible by some experts in brain
reactions to trauma. So I think it is going to be there in the
brain, and hopefully technology will be able to find it and
understand. And then I think one of the values of this research
is, of course, to understand what is happening, but also to
point out that here is a concrete place where we can find this
difference to make it clear to parents and even kids as they
grow older that these are consequences that are going to stay
with them if they are not careful about their media exposure.
Senator Brownback. You have commented, Dr. Cantor, about
how we are conducting a vast experiment in raising children
with the exposure that we are allowing. Is this experiment
comparable to feeding our children fatty food constantly and
then seeing how they turn out, or what is it--you talk in very
dangerous terms when you say ``a vast experiment'' here.
Dr. Cantor. I believe it is very dangerous, and I believe
that parents need to be at least as concerned about what their
children consume in the media as what they consume while
eating. Both can have very long-term and devastating
consequences. And it is a vast experiment, because we were not
designed--I think that Dr. Rich made a very good point about
the fact that we were not designed to have our fight-or-flight
reactions going wild every day for 3 or 4 hours while we are
watching television. We were designed to have that mechanism
tripped when it was necessary to save our own lives. Now we do
not have to do that very often, fortunately, in our society.
But what we have--we have developed a technology that brings
these horrible and threatening images into our homes and trips
that mechanism over and over again.
What the brain mapping is already showing is that our
perceptual apparatus seems to give messages to the brain when
we see somebody slit someone's throat in these horrible movies.
These messages are very similar to what the brain would get if
that was actually happening in front of us. And the
consequences are very dire, apparently. But it is only because
technology has made it possible to see somebody do this over
and over again. Whereas, in the real world, fortunately, that
would probably never happen. Or if it happened to us once, that
would be it.
So we have just created, by technology, an entertainment
system that is based on horror and horrible things. And the
interesting thing is that we call it ``entertainment.'' And we
call it entertainment, I think, because it does arouse us and
give us some kind of a charge. But the fact that our society
has labeled this ``entertainment'' and has put so much of its
entertainment resources toward these things, as opposed to
spending more time developing other interesting, fun themes, is
unfortunate.
I think we could find other--if we put more resources into
other things, we might be able to entertain people without
these negative consequences.
Senator Brownback. Yes. I was just sitting here as you were
mentioning that, thinking of the original horror movies, such
as perhaps ``Frankenstein'', and how those movies would
probably be laughable today given the standards of the
technology now. You would probably laugh at the original
Frankenstein set of movies instead of being horrified.
Dr. Cantor. Well, little kids will still get----
Senator Brownback. Yes.
Dr. Cantor. But as they grow up and become desensitized--I
mean, the film industry is very proud of how it can create
these horrific images, and they get awards for it. But these
images, are incredibly disturbing to the human system. And just
calling this entertainment and having repetitive exposure can
have long-term effects. And I think, way back, the Greeks had
tragedies. And everybody says, ``Oh, well, they had it back
then.'' But I imagine that you got to go to one tragedy a year,
because this was live and it was very difficult to put
together. But we can have 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
Greek tragedies coming at us. And the effects on our immune
system, our health, our psychological health, are enormous.
And I think brain mapping is really going to help get at
what is going on inside in ways that we can get at only
peripherally by asking people to report with their words.
Dr. Rich. To extend what Dr. Cantor was saying, not only is
this a vast experiment; it is a vast uncontrolled experiment.
An experiment, you know, sort of assumes that someone sat down
and said, ``Let's test this. Let's see what this compared to
this looks like.'' And we are in areas now where those of us
who do research on a regular basis are saying, ``Will I be able
to get this past the ethics board of the institution at which
I'm doing it,'' because I am asking whether humans can deal
with material that the ethics board may say, ``No, you can't
show kids that.''
If you think about it, we are doing this experiment with
movies that the industry itself says are not good for kids and
yet markets to kids. We are doing that with video games. We are
doing it every single day, as you say, 24 hours a day. But I
think to call it an experiment, unfortunately, elevates it to a
level of thought and control that it does not have. It is out
of control.
Senator Brownback. Dr. Rich and others, is it fair to say
that there is clearly a public health impact to consuming the
violent entertainment that we are doing today in this vast
experiment?
Dr. Rich. Absolutely.
Senator Brownback. Dr. Kunkel?
Dr. Kunkel. Absolutely.
Dr. Cantor. Absolutely.
Senator Brownback. And none of you have any qualms about
saying that there is a public health impact from consuming the
levels of violent entertainment that we have today.
Dr. Rich. I see it every day in children who come in to see
me.
Dr. Kunkel. It is a risk factor, in the same way that
cigarette smoking is a risk factor. Not every one who smokes
cigarettes dies of lung cancer, but it is a statistically
significant risk factor. The more you smoke, the longer you
smoke, the more likely the negative outcome. This same
relationship exists with TV violence. It is just that TV
violence is not the only factor that contributes to real-world
violence----
Dr. Cantor. Right.
Dr. Kunkel.--and aggression.
Dr. Cantor. I would say it is a risk factor for becoming
violent, but also there are effects on everyone, such as
increased levels of hostility, feeling anxious, those kinds of
things that do not always--there is a small percent that become
violent, but there is a much more pervasive effect on most kids
that has to do with emotional desensitization, fears, and those
sorts of things.
Senator Brownback. So all of you--I want to be very clear
on this--all of you believe that the levels of violent
entertainment being consumed by our children today cause
significant public health impact.
Dr. Cantor. Yes.
Dr. Kunkel. Yes.
Dr. Rich. And it is one in which we can intervene, even
more importantly.
Dr. Kunkel. Yes, we stand with all of the agencies that
have been mentioned here today, the U.S. Surgeon General, the
National Institute of Mental Health, the National Academies of
Science, all of whom or all of which have reviewed this
evidence and come to the same conclusion.
Senator Brownback. Thank you all very much. It has been a
very instructive, very strong panel, and I appreciate very much
your attendance.
The next panel includes Dr. Daniel Anderson. He is a
professor in the Department of Psychology, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, and Dr. John Murray, professor at
Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
Dr. Anderson, thank you very much for joining us. This
panel will be talking about the specifics of the brain-mapping
work and what we have found to date. I appreciate very much
your attendance, and the floor is yours.
STATEMENT OF DR. DANIEL R. ANDERSON, PROFESSOR,
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF
MASSACHUSETTS
Dr. Anderson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I have studied the children's use of television and the
impact of television on children for 30 years. Unlike the
previous panelists, my focus has actually been more on the
positive as well as the negative impact of media. My work is
focused on the impact of television on cognitive development
and academic achievement. I have done, also, a bit of work on
violence.
American children spend more time with electronic media
than they spend in any other activity except sleep. While some
research has shown negative effects, especially from television
violence, other research has shown the positive impact of
television programs that are designed to benefit children.
For example, colleagues and I interviewed teenagers we had
intensively studied as preschoolers in Springfield,
Massachusetts, and Topeka, Kansas, your home State, during the
early 1980s. We found that the more these teens had watched
educational programs such as ``Sesame Street'' when they were
preschoolers, the better grades they received in high school in
English, math, and science. They also reported reading more
books for pleasure than did teens that had not been regular
viewers of educational television. I should also point out that
the more these kids had watched educational television as
preschoolers, the less likely they were to endorse violent and
aggressive solutions to common problems that are encountered on
a daily basis. The point is that electronic media can be
designed to have a beneficial impact on children, an impact
that is traceable more than a decade later.
The design of educational TV programs has greatly
benefitted from behavioral research concerning children's
attention to and comprehension of television. Such research has
been incorporated into the design of popular and effective
preschool TV programs. And here I will name the ones that I
have worked on--``Sesame Street,'' ``Blue's Clues,'' ``Dora the
Explorer,'' ``Bear in the Big Blue House,'' among others.
Now, the advance of medical technology has made possible an
extraordinary opportunity to further increase our understanding
of how children and adults attend to and comprehend electronic
media. This advance allows the three-dimensional imaging of
brain activity. This can be used to track brain activity as
viewers watch and respond to film, television, or computer
displays.
I have had the fortune to design one of the first studies
of brain activation as adults viewed visual action sequences in
films. My colleagues in this research were from the University
of Massachusetts and from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center in New York, where the research took place.
We wanted to know what parts of the brain are activated
when adults comprehend visual film action sequences. Action
sequences unfold over many successive film shots, and the
viewer, in order to understand the action sequence, must make
many inferences concerning space, time, implied but not
explicitly shown actions, and character intentions, among
others.
Although comprehension of film action sequences seems
effortless to adults, we had no idea what parts of the brain
accomplished this. We showed action sequences to adult viewers
and recorded their brain activation using functional magnetic
resonance imaging. We compared this activation to brain
activation during sequences of unrelated film shots. These
sequences were just jumbles of images. We were interested in
identifying those areas of the brain that are uniquely
activated by the coherent, understandable sequences. We argue
that these brain areas are those that are most important for
visual comprehension of film.
We found 11 such brain areas, all in the cerebral cortex,
and most in the right hemisphere. When we considered what is
known about the function of these brain areas, a sensible story
emerges. For the first time, we really begin to understand how
the brain puts together the pictures and makes sense of what we
see. These areas are involved in face and object recognition,
the perception of action, movement, space, the sequencing of
events, and the emotional interpretation of experience.
We consider this study just the beginning of what neuro-
imaging can tell us about media comprehension and, eventually,
media impact. Based on my experience with behavioral research,
the information gained from neuro-imaging will eventually
inform us about ways to maximize the beneficial impact of media
and about ways to minimize the harmful impact. I strongly
support any initiative to provide dedicated funding to this
emerging and most promising area of science.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Anderson follows:]
Prepared Statement of Daniel R. Anderson Professor, Department of
Psychology, University of Massachusetts
American children spend more time with electronic media than they
spend in any other activity except sleep. While some research has shown
negative effects, especially from television violence, other research
has shown the positive impact of television programs that are designed
to benefit children. For example, colleagues and I interviewed
teenagers we had intensively studied as preschoolers in Springfield,
Massachusetts and Topeka, Kansas during the early 1980s. We found that
the more these teens had watched educational programs such as Sesame
Street when they were preschoolers, the better grades they received in
high school in English, math, and science. They also reported reading
more books for pleasure than did teens that had not been regular
viewers of educational television. \1\ The point is that electronic
media can be designed to have a beneficial impact on children, an
impact that is traceable more than a decade later.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Anderson, D.R., Huston, A.C., Schmitt, K.L., Linebarger, D.L. &
Wright, J.C. (2001). Early childhood television viewing and adolescent
behavior. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development,
68(1), Serial No. 264, 1-143.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The design of educational TV programs has greatly benefited from
behavioral research concerning children's attention to and
comprehension of television. Such research has been incorporated into
the design of popular and effective preschool TV programs such as
Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, Dora the Explorer, and Bear in the Big
Blue House, among others. \2\ Now, the advance of medical technology
has made possible an extraordinary opportunity to further increase our
understanding of how adults and children attend to and comprehend
electronic media. This advance allows the 3-dimensional imaging of
brain activity. This can be used to track brain activity as viewers
watch and respond to film, television, or computer displays. I have had
the fortune to design one of the first studies of brain activation as
adults viewed visual action sequences in films. My colleagues in this
research were from the University of Massachusetts and from the
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York where the research
took place.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Anderson, D.R. (in press). Watching children watch television
and the creation of Blue's Clues. In H. Hendershot (Ed.), Nickelodeon
nation: The history, politics, and economics of America's only TV
channel for kids. New York: New York University Press.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
We wanted to know what parts of the brain are activated when adults
comprehend visual film action sequences. Action sequences unfold over
many successive film shots and the viewer, in order to understand the
action sequence, must make many inferences concerning space, time,
implied but not explicitly shown actions, and character intentions,
among others. Although comprehension of film action sequences seems
effortless to adults, we had no idea what parts of the brain accomplish
this. We showed action sequences to adult viewers and recorded their
brain activation using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We
compared this activation to brain activation during sequences of
unrelated film shots. We were interested in identifying those areas of
the brain that are uniquely activated by the coherent, understandable
sequences. We argue that these brain areas are those that are most
important for visual comprehension of film.
We found 11 such brain areas, all in the cerebral cortex, and most
in the right hemisphere. When we considered what is known about the
function of these brain areas, a sensible story emerges. These areas
are involved in face and object recognition, the perception of action,
movement, and space, the sequencing of events, and the emotional
interpretation of experience. \3\
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\3\ Anderson, D.R., Fite, K.V., Petrovich, N. & Hirsch, J. (2003).
Cortical Activation During Comprehension of Visual Action Sequences: An
fMRI Study. Unpublished manuscript, University of Massachusetts at
Amherst.
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We consider this study just the beginning of what neuroimaging can
tell us about media comprehension and eventually, media impact. Based
on my experience with behavioral research, the information gained from
neuroimaging will eventually inform us about ways to maximize the
beneficial impact of media and about ways to minimize the harmful
impact. I strongly support any initiative to provide dedicated funding
to this emerging and most promising area of science.
Senator Brownback. That is a good way to put it at the end,
too, that we can learn what works for good and what works for
ill in the media, because television can be very beneficial.
You have listed several of the favorite programs of my two
younger children. They also have several others that were not
listed earlier, but those programs have more of a violent touch
to them than the ones you listed. They like those, as well.
Dr. Murray, good to see you, old friend.
Dr. Murray. Well, thank you very much.
Senator Brownback. Welcome to the Committee.
STATEMENT OF JOHN P. MURRAY, Ph.D., PROFESSOR, KANSAS STATE
UNIVERSITY
Dr. Murray. Thank you, Chairman, for inviting me. And thank
you for your continued support of this issue, because you have
been talking about it for a long time.
And, as we know, and as we have heard from other testimony,
this is an issue that has confronted Congress and the Senate,
in particular--I dare say this very Committee, Senate Commerce
Committee, in 1969, and I think it was in this room. I actually
attended that hearing, when the Surgeon General was asked what
he thought about TV violence and would he be willing to
undertake a major study of TV violence and children, which he
did. And I had the good fortune to serve on that Committee back
in 1969.
Senator Brownback. Think of the context of the--I do not
mean to interrupt you--but violence in 1969, what type of
television shows we were talking about at that time?
Dr. Murray. Oh, let us see. I will take a guess. My memory
fades a bit, but they would have been ``Kojak,'' ``Starsky and
Hutch;'' before that, ``Dragnet.''
Senator Brownback. ``Dragnet'' is violent.
Dr. Anderson. If I could comment on that, the Saturday
morning cartoon shows were exceptionally violent in ways that
they are not now, and they tended to show explicit violence
with gore. That all dropped out after----
Dr. Murray. But you are quite correct; it was a very
different kind of violence than the kinds of violence we have
seen now. And you have raised that issue with the previous
panel, and there is the general feeling of the kinds of
violence--both the kinds of violence and the quantity of
violence and the graphic nature has greatly increased from the
1960s to the 1970s to the 1980s to the 1990s and now into the
new century.
So this has been a longstanding issue. It is one that we
have tried to grapple with in many ways. I have spent 30 or so
years doing that in various ways.
But what I would like to talk about today is where we have
come and where we would like to go with the kinds of technology
that we have available to look at the issue of brain mapping.
I do not know whether I could use some of these pictures.
Senator Brownback. The charts? Maybe we can get some
assistance. Jana, would you mind helping out with that? Get
some charts over here.
Dr. Murray. A few charts, but I will not use many charts.
But while we are putting this up, the issue, as others have
pointed out, was discussed by the Surgeon General's report in
1972, by the National Institute of Mental Health report in
1982; the American Psychological Association produced a report
in 1992--I do not know what the meaning of these 10-year cycles
are, but we have missed it for 2002. I was fortunate to be on
the American Psychological Association panel with some other
psychologists--a task force appointed by the American
Psychological Association, the ``Task Force on Television on
Society,'' appointed in 1986. We spent 5 years interviewing
consumer groups who were concerned about violence, interviewing
the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild, performers,
producers of programming in Hollywood, interviewing other
researchers and gathering evidence. And we produced a report 5
years later, in 1992, entitled ``Big World, Small Screen, The
Role of Television in American Society,'' which is the official
report of the American Psychological Association study, and I
will leave that for the Committee. *
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* The information referred to has been retained in Committee files.
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Also, my colleagues and I, Dr. Ellen Wartella, at the
University of Texas, and Dr. Norma Pecora at Ohio University,
have been working on a new book to review the 50 years of
research on television and children. And I have with me--alas,
not the full book--Dr. Anderson will be one of the contributors
to the book, as well, the chapters--but I do have the
bibliography that we have assembled for that report; 1,945
research reports and papers published since the 1950s through
2003. About 600 of those deal with television violence issues.
The rest deal with other aspects of television and children.
So, it is not for want of some knowledge about these concerns
that we are here today. There is a great deal of evidence that
suggests that violence is worrisome.
But, as others have testified, it is rather like the
smoking and health issue. I think you are quite correct in
drawing that parallel, because it is the issue of convincing
not just mothers and fathers and the general public that this
is a serious concern, but convincing the television industry
that stands to either lose or gain quite alot if they change
their format. And they see no reason to change some of the
programming, because they feel that it works for them. It gets
audiences, it gets ratings, it gets viewers.
I think the work that we are beginning to talk about
embarking on, on brain mapping and looking at the ways in which
children process violence, is a way to break that stalemate.
If I could have that--yes, that next chart.
I always put up this chart (slide No. 1) that--I think
Senator Brownback has seen this before, and he particularly
likes it because it shows the way bills work through Congress.
It is complicated.
[Laughter.]
Dr. Murray. My point in using this chart is to explain
how--to talk about the fact that we need to understand how
observing violence on television leads to aggressive reactions
in children or adults who watch the programming.
Much of the research over the past 50 years has been on
this right-hand side of the graph showing that there is a
complex interrelationship of viewing and leading to aggressive
behavior. What we have always assumed is the activity on the
left-hand side, that watching violence leads to encoding or
memorizing the violence or recalling the violence, rehearsing
it in some way in your own mind, and then storing that away in
a manner in which it might affect your subsequent behavior. We
have always hypothesized that, but we have not been able to
look at that until very recently, with the advent of functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
And that is what we have been doing with our study at
Kansas State University and at the University of Texas Health
Science Center in San Antonio, where we were able to invite
children to come to the Research Imaging center, where we had
equipment, magnetic resonance imaging units, available to study
their brains while they watched violent and nonviolent
material.
If you have ever had an MRI, you know that it can be
sometimes a little off-putting and it is a little noisy and
what have you, but the children were less intimidated by this.
They were quite interested in the technology and the science of
it.
They would view the video clips that we showed them while
they were reclining in a magnetic resonance imaging unit. We
showed the videotapes to them by projecting video images into a
plastic mirror that projected the video down the bore of the
MRI and bounced the image off a plastic mirror right above
their head. So, while the mirror was only about the size of the
palm of your hand, it, in fact, filled their whole visual
field. And they listened to the audio track through headphones
that were like the old airline headphones. They are air-powered
headphones rather than electrical-powered headphones, because
that would not work in a strong magnetic field.
So this is an example (slide No. 2) of one of the children
who participated in this study. The kinds of material that we
showed them consisted of one of three kinds. Well, they saw all
three kinds of video stimuli. The violence that we used, we
took as video clips from a movie, a popular movie at the time,
Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone's most recent movie at that time.
It features, like many of the Rocky movies, a fight at the
beginning, and a fight at the end, and a lot of ``stuff'' that
goes on in between.
We were interested in this particular kind of violence for
two reasons. One, you may note--this is the jacket cover from
the DVD (slide No. 3) you may note that it was PG violence. We
were going to be screening this to 8- to 12-year-old boys and
girls, so we wanted to use material that they would normally
see. Using things like ``Reservoir Dogs'' or there is far more
ghastly violence out there, but using that would be
inappropriate with these youngsters. And we wanted to see just
how they processed this sort of ``PG'' violence.
So we used two clips, two three-minute clips from Rocky
IV--a fight at the beginning that lasts about three minutes, in
which Rocky's friend Apollo takes on a superhuman Russian
fighter, Drago, I believe his name was, over here, and Drago
beats him bloody and senseless and kills him in the ring. It
ends with Apollo falling to the ground, blood pouring out. And
the final clip, as I recall, is Drago saying, ``If he dies, he
dies.'' And that is sort of--you end there. The ending fight
was Rocky then taking on the superhuman Russian fighter and, of
course, winning in the end after a bloody battle of 3 minutes.
Now, what was interesting about this is that this is the
kind of violence that most kids will see in films, will see in
television. As a matter of fact, this played on television,
because we pulled that from an earlier study. So, it played on
commercial television, and any child would be likely to see
that. The other issue was that we wanted it to be interpersonal
violence, one-on-one sustained interpersonal violence, and that
is the other reason for choosing this video clip.
Now, they actually saw two three-minute clips of these
boxing scenes. They also saw two other kinds of programming,
nonviolent programming, which consisted of a three-minute clip
of National Geographic special of baby animals at play--we
wanted a lot of action, but no violence--and a three-minute
clip of Children's Television Workshop program,
``Ghostwriter,'' which is a children's program for that age
group, 8- to 10-year-olds, dealing with literacy issues and
reading skills, but it is set in a mystery context. So there
was human action, a lot of movement, some mystery, but no
violence. They also saw, as a part of the control, another set
of two three-minute clips of just a white X on a blue screen.
And the reason for that is that when your eyes are open, a
whole bunch of activations will occur in the brain just
watching anything. And so we wanted to be able to pull out
anything that was related to the nonviolence.
The next, and I believe my final, slide (slide No. 4) is
the results of this study. We scanned eight children--five
boys, three girls--who participated in the study, so it is a
beginning study, and it is, as Dr. Anderson pointed out, very
difficult to do these studies, so this is just the beginning.
We scanned their brains continuously in the MRI while they
watched these six three-minute clips of violence, nonviolence,
and control. So, there were 18 minutes of continuous scanning
in the MRI, which is a huge amount of information on the
children's brains. We also scanned for about 5 minutes before
and 5 minutes after in order to get a structural image of their
brains, because everyone's brain differs. That is a nice thing
to know. We are all a bit different in size and structure. But
the basic pieces there are all in the same place.
And what this particular slide is, is the composite of all
eight children. There happened to be eight slides here, or
eight pictures here, but each one is a composite of all eight
children while they were viewing violence with all the other
video stimuli subtracted out. So we compiled all of their
brains for the 6 minutes that they viewed the violence and
subtracted out all of the activations that were related to
viewing 6 minutes of the X or viewing 6 minutes of the
nonviolence. So this is the residual activations of these eight
children. And these slides are different slices through the
brain--we did not have to do that, thankfully--the technology
allows us to re-compose these images without slicing open the
brain. Starting at the top left, it is the slice very much up
at the top of the brain, and then successive slices all the way
down. You begin to see where the eyeballs are as you come down
lower into the brain here. And then down at the very base of
the brain down here, the last slide.
What is significant about these? We went into this assuming
that we would see--because we were showing them violence--that
we would see emotional arousal, that we would see activation of
an area of the brain that senses threat or danger, and others
have made reference to this earlier, and it is an organ in the
brain called the amygdala. And there are actually two of them,
one of the right and one on the left, at the base of the brain.
Amygdala, I believe, is Latin for almond. It is sort of an
almond shape about the size of your thumbnail. And that is the
organ that prepares the body for fight or flight. It senses
danger in the environment. If someone were to drop a snake in
front of the recorder, I think you would gasp for a moment. And
that gasp, that--gasp--is the amygdala preparing the body for
danger and preparing the body for fight or flight. It stops
respiration, it pulls blood back from the periphery into the
central core so that you do not bleed to death if you are
attacked, and so on, and so forth.
We expected to see activation of the amygdala, because what
they were watching was an inherently threatening encounter. And
we expected to see predominantly right-sided activation--
activations on the right hemisphere of the brain, because that
is an area in which you see a lot of emotional processing.
Well, we got that. What you see here are these predominantly
right-sided activations. Here, you have to go down way into the
base of the brain, but you see strong activation of the
amygdala. Right here, on the right side. That is even more
interesting, because that is where the negative emotional
arousal was sitting, as opposed to the left side of the
amygdala. So you get activation there on the right side.
The other things that we found, though, the two things that
we found that were surprising are, up here in the very first
picture you see a little activation in an area on the right
side of the brain, on the cortex, up at the top, called the
premotor cortex. It is an area of the brain that controls not
movement, but ``thinking'' about movement. So if I were to plan
to pick up that glass, if I went to reach for the glass, before
I ever moved my hand the premotor cortex would kind of play out
what I have to do to position the hand and move it in and grab
this without spilling it all over the microphone. And then the
motor cortex would kick in, and that would actually control the
physical movement.
What we saw was premotor cortex, and we looked at that for
a moment and said, ``Gosh, I wonder what's going on there?''
Well, the answer to that, after my colleagues and I pondered
that for awhile, the answer to that is that what was happening
is that these youngsters could not move in the MRI. They were
completely immobilized in the MRI, because any movement would
cause problems with the brain scans. But they were watching--
remember, they were watching close interpersonal violence,
constant beatings and boxing and fighting. And what was going
on there, the best interpretation, is that they were thinking
about making the movements. They could not make the movements,
so you did not see motor cortex activated, but you saw premotor
cortex. They could not make the movements, but they were
thinking about ``imitating'' these movements.
Any parent who has watched a young child or several young
children sit and watch, say, some sort of kickboxing cartoon or
a Power Rangers cartoon or Power Rangers on television, you
will notice that they start kind of--about halfway through,
start pushing and shoving and start kickboxing with their
brothers and sisters. That is exactly what we are talking about
here, you were getting spontaneous attempts to imitate the
violence that they were seeing, the boxing in this case.
The other area of the brain that was really surprising was
in the back of the brain, up here at the top, an area called
the posterior cingulate. It is an area of the brain that we
were really surprised to see activated in this context. My
colleagues were doing work at the Audie Murphy Veterans
Administration Hospital, which is part of the San Antonio
Medical Center complex, working with military veterans who are
suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. They were
also doing some work with women who had been victims of rape
and were suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. And when
they would put them in the MRI and ask them to recall the
memories, the things that were causing them so much distress,
these memories that flood back and cause night sweats and
terrors, as they began to recall those, it was the posterior
cingulate that was activated.
The general interpretation is that that area in the back of
the brain is where human beings store traumatic memories, or
significant life-threatening memories or really important
memories that have to be stored for long-term memory, or they
get stored away for long-term memory, and are easily recalled.
Long-term memory, in the normal sense of remembering the
multiplication tables, if you can cast your mind back to that,
is usually stored on the left side, in the left hemisphere, in
the parietal area. But, the posterior cingulate is a very
peculiar area of the brain that is specialized to storing
dangerous, significant memories.
And here these kids were storing and activating an area of
the brain that seems to be reserved for long-term memories of
trauma, while they were watching what they knew to be
entertainment violence.
My point on all this is that they could tell you, every one
of those children could say, ``Oh, I know Rocky programs. I've
seen some Rocky films.'' They knew it was make-believe. They
knew it was staged. But the brain did not know that it was
staged. The brains of these children, as, I think, the brains
of everyone else, treat this entertainment violence as
something significant, something real, and something that you
should pay attention to and store it away for long-term memory.
That, I think, is the scariest part of the whole study. I,
again, emphasize that this is an initial study. It is very
early in our investigations. But what we have got is a story
that can be quite frightening, that kids are growing up
watching a lot of violence, and their brains, at least, and
they themselves, are treating it and storing away in a manner
that allows them to recall it instantly and use it as a guide
for behavior. So by the time--there have been studies that show
that--based on content analysis, that by the time a youngster
graduates from high school, he will have seen 100,000 assaults
and, you know, 30,000 murders. There are various figures
floating around. But all of those are stored away, or at least
a big chunk of them are stored away as possible guides for
future behavior. So someone pushes in front of them in line,
someone disses them, they do not have to think for a long time
about how to respond. They have seen how Sly Stallone will
respond, and they will lash out and lash back.
So our concern is about the long-term memories and the
long-term effects. We have already seen studies that show long-
term effects of viewing violence. And we hope to pursue this
kind of research with the help of Congress in future brain-
mapping studies. And I will leave some extra copies of our
initial report on that study here for them.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Murray follows:]
Prepared Statement of John P. Murray, Ph.D., Professor, Kansas State
University
Neurobiological Research and the Impact of Entertainment Violence on
Children
Concern about the impact of television violence began with the
start of television broadcasting in the United States. Although the
first commercial television station was licensed by the Federal
Communications Commission in 1941, regular broadcasting did not begin
until after World War II and became established later in 1947 or 1948.
Nevertheless, the first official expression of concern about TV
violence occurred in the U.S. Congress in Hearings in the Senate and
House in 1952 and 1954. So, the issue of TV violence is not new to
Congress. What is new, however, is the breadth and depth of research
that has been accumulating on the impact of TV violence and, more
recently, emerging studies of children's brain activations while
watching TV violence.
In recent years, I have had the good fortune to study children's
brain responses to TV violence through the support of Kansas State
University, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San
Antonio, the Mind Science Foundation at San Antonio, and the College of
Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, I have
enjoyed the intellectual support of my colleagues at The Menninger
Foundation of Topeka, Kansas and Houston, Texas and the Harvard School
of Public Health and the Boston Children's Hospital Center for Media
and Children's Health. A summary of our initial research on the impact
of video violence and children's brain activations was published in the
October, 2001 issue of the monthly mental health journal, Psychiatric
Times (available online at: www.psychiatrictimes.com/p011070.html and
attached as an Appendix to this testimony).
Research on brainmapping and TV violence is the outgrowth of a
large and robust scientific literature on the impact of video
violence--research that began in the 1950s and continues to date. I and
my colleagues, Norma Pecora (Ohio University) and Ellen Wartella
(University of Texas, Austin), are preparing a book that will review
the history of research on television and children and will provide a
comprehensive bibliography of the research and publications in this
field. (The book is: Children and Television: 50 Years of Research,
edited by Norma Pecora, John P. Murray, and Ellen Wartella, to be
published by Erlbaum Publishers in late 2003.) I have provided the
Committee staff with a draft of the comprehensive bibliography of 1,945
reports on children and television--approximately 600 of these reports
deal with the issue of TV violence. However, the issue being discussed
in this Hearing-- neurological correlates of video violence--is only
foreshadowed as a future possibility in this new book because there is
very little in the way of completed studies. *
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* The information referred to has been retained in Committee files.
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What we have learned from the vast body of research on children and
television--and especially the research on TV violence--is the
suggestion that viewing violence does influence the attitudes, values
and behavior of children and adults who view this material. The main
types of effects are three in number:
1. Aggression: Viewing video violence leads to increases in
aggressive behavior and changes in attitudes and values
favoring the use of aggression to solve conflicts;
2. Desensitization: Viewing video violence may lead to a
decrease in concern about the pain and suffering of others;
lower levels of concern about violence in society; and an
increased willingness to tolerate violence; and
3. Fear: Viewing video violence may lead to increased concern
about one's personal safety; heightened fear that one may be
the victim of violence; and decreased trust in the motives of
others--a phenomenon known as the ``mean world syndrome.''
The effects described above have been identified in various studies
over the past 50 years and they represent a very worrisome set of
outcomes of violence viewing. However, much less is known about how
these effects play out in individuals--how do children or adults come
to understand and process the violence that they see in entertainment
media?
Our initial study of brainmapping and TV violence in children
begins to provide some insights into the ways in which children process
video violence. Much more research is needed before we can fully
understand the effects of video violence, but enhanced brainmapping
research can lead to significant progress in dealing with media
violence.
In our study, conducted at the Research Imaging Center (RIC) of the
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA), we
used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to map the brains of
eight children (5 boys, 3 girls), ages 8 to 13 years while they watched
violent and nonviolent videotapes. The youngsters who participated in
this study were normal, healthy boys and girls who were good students
and had no history of problems at school or home.
The children viewed six, 3-minute, video clips--two clips each of
violence (Rocky IV), nonviolence (National Geographic and Ghostwriter),
and a control for viewing activations (a white ``X'' on a blue video
screen). During these 18 minutes of viewing, we continuously scanned
their brains while they viewed in the MRI. We also scanned for several
minutes before and after the viewing to establish structural/anatomical
features of their brains.
In designing the study, we anticipated that we would see emotional
arousal to the video violence and that this would be manifested in
significant right hemisphere activations. In particular, we anticipated
seeing involvement of an area of the brain that senses ``danger'' in
the environment--the amygdala--and prepares the body for `fight or
flight' and we expected prefrontal cortex activation.
The results of the scans confirmed our initial expectations and
provided some additional surprising insights. In particular, two
additional areas of the brain that were activated told us a very
interesting story about what was happening in the minds of these young
viewers. In the first instance, an area of the prefrontal cortex--the
premotor cortex--was activated while viewing violence (not the other
video clips) and this suggested that the youngsters were `thinking
about moving' (they could not move in the MRI and had they moved we
would see motor cortex activation). Rather, what was happening while
the youngsters watched the boxing, was a possible attempt at imitation
of the boxing movements--thinking about but not able to actually
imitate the movements. This is similar to what parents have observed
when they see young children watching kick-boxing actions; the young
viewers are likely to start imitating the movements on their brothers
and sisters.
The second surprising finding was an activation in the back of the
brain--the posterior cingulate--an area that seems to be devoted to
long-term memory storage for significant or traumatic events. My
colleagues in this research had been working with military personnel
who were being seen at the adjoining Audie Murphy Veterans
Administration Health Center for severe post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). When they scanned the brains of PTSD patients and asked them to
recall the events and images that were causing them distress, the
posterior cingulate was the area activated. Now, in our study, these
children were not suffering from PTSD but they were watching traumatic
and dramatic violence (although the movie was rated ``PG'').
In summary, the results or our initial, and very limited study, of
children's brain activations while viewing entertainment video
violence, suggest that the violence is arousing, engaging, and is
treated by the brain as a real event that is threatening and worthy of
being stored for long-term memory in an area of the brain that makes
`recall' of the events almost instantaneous. This is as `scary' as it
gets; even more than an ``R'' rated slasher film. Here, we see normal
children storing away violent images in a manner that could be used to
`guide' future behavior. Naturally, this is only the beginning of the
story and we need to conduct much more extensive research on
neuroimaging and violence.
Thank you for your consideration of this testimony.
______
Psychiatric Times October 2001 Vol. XVIII Issue 10
TV Violence and Brainmapping in Children
by John P. Murray, Ph.D.
Research conducted over the past 30 years leads to the conclusion
that televised violence does influence viewers' attitudes, values and
behavior (Hearold, 1986; Murray, 2000, 1994, 1973; Paik and Comstock,
1994; Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and
Social Behavior, 1972). Although the social effect of viewing televised
violence is a controversial topic of research and discussion, the body
of research is extensive and fairly coherent in demonstrating
systematic patterns of influence. In general, there seem to be three
main classes of effects:
Aggression. Viewing televised violence can lead to increases
in aggressive behavior and/or changes in attitudes and values
favoring the use of aggression to solve conflicts (Huston et
al., 1992).
Desensitization. Extensive violence viewing may lead to
decreased sensitivity to violence and a greater willingness to
tolerate increasing levels of violence in society (Drabman and
Thomas, 1974; Thomas et al., 1977).
Fear. Extensive exposure to television violence may produce
the ``mean world syndrome,'' in which viewers overestimate
their risk of victimization (Gerbner, 1970; Gerbner et al.,
1994).
Although we know that viewing televised violence can lead to
increases in aggressive behavior or fearfulness and to changed
attitudes and values about the role of violence in society, we need to
know more about how these changes occur in viewers--the neurological
processes that lead to changes in social behavior.
Within the context of social learning theory, we know that changes
in behavior and thoughts can result from observing models in the world
around us, such as parents, peers or the mass media. The processes
involved in modeling or imitating overt behavior were addressed in
social learning theories from the 1960s (Bandura, 1969, 1965, 1962;
Berkowitz, 1965, 1962), but we must expand our research approaches if
we are to understand the neurological processes that might govern the
translation of the observed models into thoughts and actions.
Both Bandura (1994) and Berkowitz (1984) have provided some
theoretical foundations for the translation of communication events
into thoughts and actions. Bandura's social-cognitive approach and
Berkowitz's cognitive-neoassociation analysis posit a role for
emotional arousal as an ``affective tag'' that may facilitate lasting
influences. With regard to aggression, we know that viewing televised
violence can be emotionally arousing (e.g., Cline et al., 1973; Osborn
and Endsley, 1971; Zillmann, 1982, 1971), but we lack direct measures
of cortical arousal or neuroanatomical patterns in relation to viewing
violence.
The pursuit of neurological patterns in viewing violence would
likely start with the amygdala, because it has a well-established role
in controlling physiological responses to emotionally arousing or
threatening stimuli (Damasio, 1999, 1994; LeDoux, 1996; Ornstein,
1997). Indeed, a National Research Council report (Reiss and Roth,
1993) concluded:
All human behavior, including aggression and violence, is the
outcome of complex processes in the brain. Violent behaviors
may result from relatively permanent conditions or from
temporary states . . . Biological research on aggressive and
violent behavior has given particular attention to . . .
functioning of steroid hormones such as testosterone and
glucocorticoids, especially their action on steroid receptors
in the brain; . . . neurophysiological (i.e., brain wave)
abnormalities, particularly in the temporal lobe of the brain;
brain dysfunctions that interfere with language processing or
cognition.
Thus, one suggestion for further research on the impact of viewing
media violence is to assess some of its neurological correlates. In
particular, the use of videotaped violent scenes can serve as the ideal
stimulus for assessing activation patterns in response to violence.
It is very likely that the amygdala is involved in processing
violence, but the projections to the cortex are not clear. However,
developing hypotheses about viewing violence and brain activation needs
to start with research on physiological arousal (e.g., Osborn and
Endsley, 1971; Zillmann, 1982; Zillmann and Bryant, 1994) and then link
this to cortical arousal. In this regard, the work of Paul Ekman,
Ph.D., and Richard Davidson, Ph.D., using electroencephalogram
recordings while subjects viewed gruesome films indicated asymmetries
in activation patterns in the anterior regions of the left and right
hemispheres (Davidson et al., 1990; Ekman and Davidson, 1993; Ekman et
al., 1990). In particular, positive affect (indexed by facial
expression) was associated with left-sided anterior activation, while
negative affect was associated with right-sided activation (Davidson et
al., 1990).
Our preliminary research (Liotti et al., in press; Murray et al.,
2001) has focused on the amygdala and related structures in an effort
to identify the neurological correlates of viewing televised violence.
In this instance, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
to map the brains of eight children (five boys, three girls; aged 8 to
13 years) while they watched violent and nonviolent videotapes. The
violent video segments consisted of two, three-minute clips of boxing
from ``Rocky IV.'' The nonviolent video segments were two, three-minute
clips of a National Geographic program on animals at play and
``Ghostwriter,'' a children's literacy program set in a mystery
context. In addition, we presented two, three-minute control, rest/
fixation clips of an ``X'' on a blue screen.
We conducted whole-brain (18 to 22 slices) echoplanar fMRI
throughout the 18 minutes of viewing. Following the viewing, structural
or anatomical (aMRI) images were acquired. Both the fMRI and aMRI
images were normalized to Talairach space, and statistical analyses
were conducted with task-induced blood oxygenation-level dependent
(BOLD) changes detected using a conventional statistical parametric
mapping method of voxel-wise independent paired t-tests.
In this study, we found that both violent and nonviolent viewing
activated regions implicated in aspects of visual and auditory
processing. In contrast, however, viewing violence selectively
recruited right precuneus, right posterior cingulate, right amygdala,
bilateral hippocampus and parahippocampus, bilateral pulvinar, right
inferior parietal and prefrontal, and right premotor cortex. Thus,
viewing televised violence appears to activate brain areas involved in
arousal/attention, detection of threat, episodic memory encoding and
retrieval, and motor programming. These findings are displayed in the
Figure, which provides the significant contrasts between the violence-
viewing and nonviolence-viewing sessions. The regions of interest in
the composite activations of the eight children included the amygdala,
hippocampus and posterior cingulate. These areas of the brain are
likely indicators of threat-perception and possible long-term memory
storage of the threat-event (particularly, these patterns are similar
to the memory storage of traumatic events in posttraumatic stress
disorder) (Brannan et al., 1997; Liotti et al., 2000). These activation
patterns are important because they demonstrate that viewing video
violence selectively activates right hemisphere and some bilateral
areas that collectively suggest significant emotional processing of
video violence.
Of course, this is a preliminary study with a small sample of
children, and we must conduct further studies with larger samples of
young viewers. However, this preliminary research leads us to conclude
that there are important, theoretically predictable patterns of
neurological response to viewing media violence. In our next series of
studies, we will explore these neuroanatomical correlates of viewing
violence in children who have had differing experiences with violence
in their lives in order to better understand the processes of
sensitization and desensitization.
In this instance, we will assess the responses of children who have
experienced violence as victims of abuse, in contrast to youngsters who
are more aggressive. We also expect to see differences in response to
viewing violence among the abused, high-aggression and low-aggression
children. We expect to see increased responsiveness to threat in the
abused children and decreased responsiveness to threat in the high-
aggression children.
Furthermore we anticipate differences in media preferences and
viewing patterns to correlate with the level of aggression in these
children. This constellation of findings will begin to address the
patterns of response to aggression and the learning of aggression from
media models. The issues of desensitization and enhanced aggression may
be related to the patterns of brain activation observed in these
children. The social significance of brain mapping and violence viewing
is the contribution these studies make to our understanding of the
learning and cognitive/affective processing of aggression in children
and youth.
Dr. Murray is professor of developmental psychology in the School
of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University and
director of the Media and Mind Program at the Mind Science Foundation
in San Antonio. He is also a trustee of The Menninger Foundation.
Senator Brownback. Thank you very much, Dr. Murray. Are
there other researchers that are doing similar brain-mapping
work?
Dr. Murray. Well, Dr. Anderson has been doing some work
with adults on understanding visual materials, television
material, not necessarily with violence, but the same
principles apply. And a group at the University of Indiana
Medical School has been looking at behavior-disordered children
and their response to clips from video violence games.
My colleague, Dr. Rich, and I are hoping to do similar
extended studies at Harvard Medical School, and particularly we
have had discussions with the chief of neuro-radiology at
Boston Children's Hospital, which is ideally set to work with
young children and do the kinds of brain mapping that would
allow us to have much greater insights into this.
Senator Brownback. Is anybody doing brain-mapping work on
the impact of sexual material? We heard from the prior panel
that there is speculation that you are triggering different
parts of the brain with violence versus sexual material, and
that the mixing of the two of them may get a double buzz going.
Dr. Murray. This is my speculation, that you combine this
kind of violence with the kind of sexual material that you find
in the genre known as ``teenage slasher films''--``Friday the
13th'' or a whole bunch--Jason and Elm Street or what-have-
you--where you suddenly have a combination of not only
violence, but also sexual arousal and eroticism in the violence
combined with the violence, you have created probably the most
potent, dangerous, flammable substance that you could possible
put together. No one has done that, and there are reasons--
well, this is all very new, so people have not had a chance to
kind of----
Senator Brownback. Explain your statement, ``You have
created the most potent, flammable''----
Dr. Murray. Because you have got arousal from several
different sources, and you have linked the fear associated with
violence with the pleasure associated with sexual arousal, and
you have got both fear and pleasure syndromes running
together--I mean, this is all speculation. We would need to
look at this. And I think what you have got is an indelible
memory. And that is why Dr. Kunkel's colleague, Edward
Donnerstein, who has looked at the effects of sexualized
violence on college students, university students, finds that--
not in an MRI--but finds that males who have watched these
sexualized violent erotica are much more likely, in some other
settings, to hold denigrating views of women, are much more
likely to be less responsive to women who have claimed that
they have been raped. It is a very complicated set of studies,
but the main message is that sexualized violence is high-
potency, high-octane violence that has some lingering effects
on the ways in which males and females will interact.
Senator Brownback. I presume both of you would support that
we need to get a lot more information from a lot more data-
points in this brain-mapping field, but both of you would view
it as quite promising for us to learn what this experiment in
entertainment with sex and violence is doing to us as a
society?
Dr. Murray. I think it is crucial. I am sorry, I jumped
ahead. But I do think it is extremely important to understand
how children, and adults, for that matter, process the violence
that they see, the sexuality that they see, and how those get
combined. And the only way we are going to do that is by having
a number of researchers in different areas doing similar kinds
of studies with equipment and bringing together their findings.
We are just at the beginning of this sort of research.
Senator Brownback. Dr. Anderson?
Dr. Anderson. You have heard just about all the research
that has been done so far, in terms of brain mapping and media.
I was not aware of Dr. Matthew's work at Indiana University.
But there is a lot of work that is going on in brain mapping on
a whole variety of issues, including mental illness and studies
of basic cognitive processes, memory, and so on. All of this
work is an interdisciplinary work that requires teams of people
from a variety of backgrounds. You have to have a neuro-
anatomist who can assign areas of activation to the brain. You
have to have a physicist who can calibrate the MRI machine. You
have to have computer scientists who generate the graphics. And
you have to have a mathematician to do the analyses. It is
quite an operation. It is very expensive. And up to this point
in time, there has simply been no focus on media as being an
issue, simply because the people who do media research
frequently do not have a background in brain studies, the
people who do brain studies have no background or necessarily
interest in media, and so on. But when the funding is available
and the time is right, and I would say the time is right now,
then, in fact, I think that this methodology can just provide
just an explosion of knowledge in--certainly in the areas that
we have been discussing, but many other areas related to media,
as well.
Senator Brownback. What will it provide? You say an
``explosion of knowledge,'' Dr. Anderson. What will this
information provide if we put forward a funding stream or
require some form of review of this nature before the release
of a product? What sort of information would we find out?
Dr. Anderson. Well, I will give you an example from my
research. One of the things that we found was that in order to
put together the way an adult puts together an understanding of
an edited sequence of shots, requires large areas in the
prefrontal lobe of the brain on the right side of the brain.
These are actually analogous to the language areas that are on
the left side of the brain. But these appear to be visual
language areas. They are areas that essentially are
comprehending the syntax, the flow of meaning, of visual
images. Well, one of the things that we know is that this area
of the brain is very immature in young children. It is the
slowest developing area of the brain. There are a few others
that I notice from Dr. Murray's charts that are also very slow
developing areas of the brain. Well, that information, and
especially if we can verify it in studies of children, that
information can tell us of some of the limitations that
children would have in processing and understanding media and
being able to put them in some kind of context.
Prior to this, prior to these studies, we did not have a
clue, other than the most basic areas--obviously, when you are
listening to television, the auditory areas area active; you
are watching the television, the visual areas are active; that
is a given--but other than that, we did not have any idea what
parts of the brain were being used to process and deal with
television. So this is very early days, but I think we have
learned so much just from these two preliminary studies, that
it is just, I think, huge. We will be able to put together a
very detailed story about how the brain--we use our brains to
process media. When we know that, then we can start to put
together a detailed story about what the impact of media will
be on the brain, and I think that can be both for good and bad,
obviously.
I guess I represent the light side, and you represent the
dark side.
Senator Brownback. So as we put that information together,
are we going to be able to know, then, the impact of the
cultural environment, or at least the impact of the consumption
of certain types of cultural materials on our children? Are we
going to be able to come to any conclusions about what sort of
impact this violent entertainment has on a percentage, a fairly
significant percentage, of children. If it has a long-term
impact that is negative?
Dr. Murray. We can certainly begin to see where----
Senator Brownback. Or positive, on the side of Dr.
Anderson?
Dr. Anderson. I guess my answer would not quite deal with
the cultural question. But here is an aspect that is
interesting. There is quite a bit of research to indicate that
children are performing better on IQ tests compared to children
from previous generations. So that when you look at the norms
from the 1930s, for example, and you test today's children with
the same tests that were given back then, today's children do
far better on those tests. But they do not do better on all
items. And, in fact, what they do better on is a set of items
that have to do with the ability to conceive of things in
three-dimensional space.
So what could possibly be accounting for that? One of our
colleagues in this research, Patricia Greenfield, has shown
that children with interactive media, who are working on games
like Tetris, and so on, that involved spatial concepts, show
improvements in this ability. Since this increase has been
going on for a long time, for generations now, other people
have speculated that movies and television have contributed to
this.
Well, in our work, we find that in order to put together
this coherent sequence of actions, an area of the brain that we
know is involved in spacial intelligence is very much
activated. And, in fact, when you think about it, as you follow
action through space on television, you have to form a model of
the environment that characters are moving through, and you
have to do it very quickly, and, of course, you are getting--as
you watch lots of movies and television, you are getting
practice doing this hour after hour, day after day, week after
week. This may have had a long-term impact, in this case for
the better, on our ability to conceive things in three-
dimensional space. But we would not have even known it, we
would not have the mechanism, without the kind of research that
we are doing showing that when you are watching these films you
are actually stimulating and activating that part of the brain.
Senator Brownback. Has the entertainment industry contacted
either of you about this brain-mapping work, saying, ``Well,
this is very interesting about what the product that we are
putting out is doing. We want to work with you in a positive
way and make sure we are feeding children good food and not bad
food''? Or broccoli and less cotton candy?
Dr. Murray. Well, I have worked--I was appointed to an
advisory board for CBS, the Children's Television Advisory
Board, in 1996-97, when we were just starting this research.
And it was to help them select some programming that would be
educational and entertaining, to respond to the Federal
Communications regulations on EI programming. And we had a very
lively discussion over about a year period. We would meet every
six months. For maybe two years, actually. And then it all fell
apart, and the committee was disbanded. And the committee
consisted of Dorothy Singer, from Yale, and myself, and Aletha
Houston, from University of Texas, and a few others.
So the possibility is there. The system fell apart because
they decided that they really did not like our advice on some
of the programs.
Senator Brownback. But have they contacted you about brain-
mapping work?
Dr. Murray. Not about the brain mapping, but--because we
talked about it at the time. I was just in the early stages of
doing this brain mapping, and they were--I guess my judgment
about the response was cautious concern. They were not exactly
pleased with the research underway, because it had the
potential for being a worrisome addition, another list of the
worries. But they were interested in the fact that you could
actually do this and that maybe it could help, as Dr. Anderson
suggests, in other ways of providing educational programming
that is far more beneficial or targeted in a better way to
enhancing children's development.
Dr. Anderson. I have actually worked quite a lot with
networks and production houses to make educational television
for young children. The research that we have drawn on so far
has been behavioral research, research on issues of
comprehension. What can a 3-year-old understand? What can a 4-
year-old understand? What can a 5-year-old understand? Issues
of attention, what is attention-worthy for a young child, what
causes them to lose their attention. And curriculum, what are
the things that a child needs to know? What needs can we serve
for that. I have got to say, at least at the preschool level,
the cable television networks, primarily Nickelodeon and
Disney, have really taken the position that it is important to
minimize the violence in their offerings, and, especially for
preschoolers, have taken the position that the programs should
be designed to be beneficial, they should have a curriculum.
Some, of course, are better than others.
But as soon as the brain-mapping research reaches a
critical mass of knowledge where we can be very sure that we
know things that are going on, I am quite certain that they
will be very interested in taking the positive aspects of it
and applying it.
Senator Brownback. Gentlemen, this is very enlightening. I
wish we had more people here. Because we have held hearings on
this in the past based almost exclusively on behavioral studies
and anecdotal information. All important, but that does not
cover hard, physical science. We have not had access to that in
the past, and I am excited to see that sort of body of
knowledge developing. It will be great to be able to build off
of that, and to take that to the country and to the industry
once we further develop the information and get it in a shape
where we are confident and comfortable with what we have. The
early information you present here seems to me to track very
closely with all the behavioral studies that we have, and
explains a lot of the behavioral studies, of which you have
documented 1,945. So it seems to me that we have been at the
point of, ``Well, I was coughing every morning from smoking,
but I don't know why,'' and now we are getting to the point of,
``well, here is why.'' This is a very important step for us to
cross and very important for us to understand as a country. For
this is a vast experiment we are doing of raising our children
on media, much of which can very good and is very good and
uplifting, but some of which can be very detrimental, and
behavioral studies are saying is very detrimental. Now we can
see the hard data of how that actually works.
I applaud your work. We are going to be working here in
Congress to attempt to get more funding so that we can develop
this very important area of studies further, and shifting
funding from other places to try to be able to develop this
work much more aggressively. We hope you and your colleagues
will engage this effort, so that we really can understand this
in a hard science setting.
Thank you for joining us. The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:25 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
Prepared Statement of Hon. Ernest F. Hollings,
U.S. Senator from South Carolina
I want to thank Senator Brownback for calling this hearing. Media
violence is an important issue that this Committee has studied on
numerous occasions. And while I am interested to hear the testimony
today on brain mapping research, I believe that this Committee has
heard ample evidence about the affect of violent programming on
children to spur Congress to take action.
For decades, renowned professors, scientists and public health
professionals have conducted extensive research to study the effect of
media violence on children. The evidence has consistently demonstrated
that exposure to media violence is related to aggressive and violent
behavior. Watching violent television shows or movies and playing
violent video games contribute to making a child more aggressive, more
desensitized to violence, and more prone to using violence to resolve
problems.
The amount and magnitude of violence in video programming and video
games continues to increase. Parents should be empowered with tools
that enable them to limit the amount of violence their children see. As
legislators, we have an obligation to help parents in this endeavor. We
need to take action to curb violent programming consistent with our
values and the Constitution.
In each of the past five Congresses, I have introduced legislation
designed to create a ``safe harbor'' time period during which parents
can be assured that children will not be exposed to violence. The
support for my legislation has been widespread and it has been reported
out of this Committee multiple times--most recently by a vote of 17 to
1. Once again, I have introduced the ``Children's Protection from
Violent Programming Act'' in this Congress.
Today, we will be hearing additional testimony supporting the
prevailing wisdom that violence begets violence. I am ready to take
action and hope that the Committee will once again act favorably on my
legislation.