Media Violence and Its Impact on Youth

From graphic video games and news reports to social media and TV shows, children and teens are exposed to violence in all forms of the media they consume. In this “Ask the Experts” webinar, “Media Violence and Its Impact on Youth,” an interdisciplinary panel of child developmentalists, neuroscientists, mass communications researchers, clinical psychologists, and juvenile justice experts shares recent research findings on media violence, how exposure affects children and teens, and what parents can do to assess risk and mitigate impacts to their children’s behavior and psychological health.

00:00 Introduction

Introduction from Kris Perry, MSW, Executive Director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development.

01:43 Brad J. Bushman, PhD

Moderator Brad Bushman, PhD, Professor of Communication at The Ohio State University, opens the webinar by briefly discussing media violence and the impact that viewing violent media has on children.

03:54 Janine Domingues, PhD

Janine Domingues, PhD, Director of Professional Training for the School and Community Programs team and a Clinical Psychologist in the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute, focuses on the effects on youth from exposure to real-world violence in the news. Dr. Domingues examines impacts on youth mental health and risk factors that increase impacts on children. She shares differentiated approaches for parents to help their young children and teens cope with distressing current events, symptoms of psychological distress, and resources for parents who may need to find more help for children experiencing severe impacts.

14:54 Karyn Riddle, PhD

Karyn Riddle, PhD, the Robert Taylor Professor in Strategic Communication in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin, Madison, outlines the known effects from exposure to violent media and shares recent research on violent child-targeted media in television and movies. She addresses the prevalence of violence in these media and different ways that violence is portrayed. She urges consideration of context and message in addition to portrayals of violence for parents assessing whether specific content is appropriate for their children.

29:30 Craig. A Anderson, PhD

Craig Anderson, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Iowa State University, begins by defining media violence and aggression. He emphasizes the main effects that short- and long-term exposure to screen media violence can have on youth and shares longitudinal research demonstrating effects on behavior into adulthood. Dr Anderson maps out the mechanisms by which violent media exposure can lead to aggressive behavior, and pays special attention to violent video games and their behavioral impacts on youth of all ages.

42:33 Melissa Sickmund, PhD

Melissa Sickmund, PhD, Director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, shares updated aggregated national statistics from the FBI on violence by and against youth, from aggravated assault to homicide, and compares the data with general perceptions of the amount of violent crime against youth. Dr. Sickmund reports on recent trends in homicides and youth suicide and offers parents and schools advice on how to minimize risks of children becoming a victim or offender of a violent crime.

57:18 Andrew Doan, MD, PhD, MPH

Andrew Doan, MD, PhD, MPH, a physician and neuroscientist, discusses the “Swiss Cheese model” risk analysis tool and how it can be used to analyze mass shooters, focusing on individual, social, and systems risk factors that can lead to tragic violence with the “perfect storm.” He notes clinical observations about the role that gaming addiction and the resultant sleep deprivation can play in psychological breakdown and suggests looking at all possible avenues of risk control via this model.

01:03:24 Group Q&A

Dr. Anderson briefly examines the recent frequency of mass shootings. Dr. Bushman then leads the panel through audience questions, focusing on what parents can do to reduce the impacts of violent media exposure on children. Themes covered include building a community around dialogue, the importance of co-engagement and active mediation, and potential regulations on violent media.

01:19:20 Closing Thoughts

Dr. Bushman invites the panelists to share their closing thoughts.

[Kris Perry]: Welcome to today’s Ask the Experts webinar: Media Violence and Its Impact on Youth. I am your host, Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens, Institute for Digital Media and Child Development. While the topic we will address today has been a concern for many years, as evidenced by the tenure of some of our convened experts, we recognize the increased urgency in light of last week’s tragedy in Uvalde. While today’s discussion extends beyond real world violence to the impacts of violent imagery across television, movies, social media and video games, we also know there’s a tendency to look for correlations and draw connections to explain behavioral shifts we see in individuals and groups. We’re glad to have several renowned researchers, clinicians, and juvenile justice experts to share their knowledge and evidence based recommendations on such a timely and pressing issue. Media Violence and Its Impact on Youth. Now, without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to today’s moderator, Dr. Brad Bushman. Dr. Bushman is a professor of communication at the Ohio State University, where he holds the Margaret Hall and Robert Randall Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication. He has studied aggression and violence for over 30 years and was recently awarded the 2022 Wharton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, Division of Peace Psychology, American Psychological Association, for his notable contributions to the integration of theory and practice in the field of conflict resolution. We are honored to have Brad with us today to lead today’s discussion. Take it away, Brad.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you. Children today are immersed in media, kind of like fish and water and all forms of media, whether it be video games, movies, television programs, contain violence and some of this violence is real. Violent media to children is like contaminated water to fish; it’s unhealthy. As a researcher, I’m especially concerned about media that glorify guns. Sadly, gun violence is on the rise in the media. For example, our own research has found that the number of acts of gun violence in PG-13 films has more than tripled since that rating was introduced in 1984. Children think media characters are cool and they want to imitate their behavior. Research has shown that children who see movie characters smoke are more likely to smoke themselves. Research has also shown that children who see movie characters drink alcohol are more likely to drink themselves. Research in my own lab has shown that children who see media characters use guns are more likely to play with real guns when they find those guns hidden in a drawer. For example, they hold the guns longer, they pull the trigger more times, including while pointing the gun at themselves or another child. Exposure to violent media is not the only risk factor for aggression and violence, but it’s not a trivial risk factor either. Fortunately, it’s a risk factor that we can do something about. Our distinguished panelists today will talk to you about what parents can do to reduce the harmful effects of violent media on children. Our first panelist is Dr. Janine Domingues. She’s the Director of Professional Training for the School and Community Programs Team and also a clinical psychologist in the Anxiety Disorder Center at the Child Mind Institute. She helps children and families deal with trauma. Take it away, Janine.

[Dr. Janine Domingues]: So I am going to focus on real world violence in the news and media and its effect on our youth. Just a little bit, these are images over the past two years of real world violence covered on the media. So we have the Ukrainian war, we have the shooting in Buffalo, some of these are in the recent six months. Just last week, the school shooting at Rob Elementary School in Texas and about two years ago, the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. So, of course, all of these images and real world violence that’s covered in media and the news has an impact on our children and youth and our mental health. So what do we know about mental health? We know that just recently the U.S. Surgeon General declared youth mental health at a crisis that one in five youth suffer from a mental health or learning disorder. And 50% of mental health disorders begin before the age of 14 and 75% begin before the age of 24. So certainly youth are much more vulnerable. And if we think about coverage around school shootings, murder, systemic racism or the insurrection and all this coverage during a time of a two year pandemic and that devastation and also nonviolent climate change disasters, certainly all of this has an impact on what our children are hearing and absorbing. What are some of the risk factors? We know research shows that just news coverage of events can produce increased fears of anxiety in children and there are certain risk factors to that. Certainly, a biological predisposition, something that comes individually for anxiety, certainly can increase the risk as we’re absorbing some of these images. But we also know greater time spent watching media coverage places, kids at greater risk. Particularly graphic images or detailed images of violence places kids at greater risk for anxiety and even symptoms of post-traumatic stress. A personal connection to the event, so knowing somebody there, proximity to the event, or even a personal connection through race, culture, ethnicity of people who are being portrayed on media can place a child at greater risk for developing anxiety and also symptoms of post-traumatic stress. And lastly, there’s some research to suggest types of media rights. So social media like TikTok and Instagram and sensationalized images on that media platform can actually place kids at a greater risk than maybe what they’re watching on the news. And lastly, I wanted to mention children who were exposed to the event. So not every child or youth who is exposed to a traumatic event goes on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. However, we know right after the event it’s a critical time. So excessive exposure or coverage of the event to that child might interfere with their recovery of that time period and place them at a greater risk for PTSD. So what does that mean for us as trusted adults, as parents? What can we do to mitigate some of these factors? The very first thing is really touching base with yourself. How do we turn down the intensity of how we’re feeling, what we’re thinking when we are bombarded by a lot of this media coverage and news and modeling coping for our children? So that doesn’t mean that we whitewash and say everything is okay, but as we talk about how maybe angry and sad we feel, we’re doing it in a way that’s contained and also modeling an appropriate way of discussing some of those emotions. Starting with school age children, so really, school age is where they are on the playground, they’re with friends, they might be getting this information from other resources and other other places. And so really you want to be the first person to start the talk about the events, start the talk about the conversation. So that way you can be the filter for what they’re hearing, you can be the creator of that narrative and also be the one who is giving accurate information as well. You want to start small, especially for school aged young children, and have them lead the discussion by asking, by having them ask questions to you and you really want to pace the conversation. So with my six year old son, you know, last week the conversation with us started by me saying, “You know, I’m feeling sad and angry because there were children who got really badly hurt and killed in a school in Texas”. And I just opened up the conversation in that way. And he his first question was, “Where’s Texas?” So that’s where he was at in that conversation. So you don’t want to always assume, you know, where your kids are going to go with it and you really want to pace that for them. You want to be open and honest. Of course, not giving a ton a ton of detail, but really focused on what actually happened and really validating and sharing emotion and thoughts. We know through research that not talking about these things or saying we’re not going to talk about it here, don’t worry about it, let’s ignore it, actually creates more anxiety for children and leaves room for them to go on and investigate on their own or actually sort of allows their imagination to take hold, so really having these conversations is incredibly important. And lastly, making them feel safe in what we can do in the here and now. How is it that the community’s keeping them safe, how our schools try to keep them safe and really rooting in facts. For older kids, for teens, you might want to assume that they already know, right? So you’re really just trying to get them to talk and have an ongoing conversation. Discussions might be around sources of what they’re getting their information from, you might have good conversations around broadening horizons around different types of news and news sources, watching some of these things with your teens can also lead to good conversation. In my practice, I talk to teens always about, especially during this time, to shut off news notifications, curate what’s on your social media, take a break. Being bombarded with a ton of information and a ton of images is like carrying a backpack full of books. It’s incredibly burdensome, and it’s not, we’re not meant to do it so you need to take a break. And lastly, creating conversation around meaning making. How is it that we can give them a sense of agency and hope? What is it that we can do? How can we get involved? How can you get involved with community, being in touch and volunteering for other people, doing good for others? This might be a time to really touch base about values and how is it that you want to show up and to contribute in the world? Lastly, other tips is really just making a plan as a family to discuss limits and collaborate with teens, limiting news consumption, monitoring media use and just keeping the conversation going, really just opening up that safe space for this. What do we want to look out for in terms of symptoms, right? What is more needed? So for younger kids, when we think about anxiety, we might see some regressive behavior, trouble sleeping, trouble separating. We might see some somatic complaints, so really anxiety living in the body, so headache, stomach aches and then just avoidance, not wanting to go to school, not wanting to leave the house. And so these might be signs that something more is happening. For older kids, it might be changes in mood, changes in the way they’re thinking, you know, the world’s not safe, I can’t go out, I can’t trust anyone, feeling more irritable. And then lastly, too avoidance, whether it’s avoiding school or just avoiding leaving their room, feeling more isolated. So, you know, your kids best. The two D’s, distress and duration, is, you know, the gold standard of when more is needed. So persistent change in mood and thoughts, change in function might be a time to reach out to a pediatrician, a psychologist, a licensed social worker for more help. Connecting with your school and getting outside perspective of what’s happening for your child might be helpful too. And resources like Childline.org where there’s free ways of coping with this, Healthy Minds, Thriving Kids is another resource on our Childline.org website where it goes through resilience coping skills that parents can actually do with their children or they can watch on their own just to really booster up resilience during this time. And that’s it. Thank you.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: What a great way to start our webinar with some real practical advice for parents to use with their children. We did get a question for you: “How does watching violence in current news, such as the war in the Middle East and Ukraine, impact children’s behavior”?

[Dr. Janine Domingues]: Yeah, I think that’s a really great question. So similarly to what I just recently discussed, I think it depends on the amount of media that’s being watched and what they’re seeing. You know, again, children can be at risk for things like anxiety, not wanting to leave, having a lot of questions. Certainly younger kids having questions and maybe being confused around, “Where this is happening? How close is it to me? What’s going on?” And then with the older teens, too, I think greater discussions around value, morality, what– you know, and so I think opening up those discussions at home is really wonderful and it’s a place to start and I think leaving room for that. And, you know, in terms of behavior, I think, you know your child best. So really just being on the lookout for things like being more isolated, being more anxious, not wanting to leave, maybe being more angry too, in the sense of like “what’s happening?” and “what’s going on?” and really continuing to open up those discussions at home.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you very much. Hopefully we’ll have some more time after all the presenters to hear some more excellent suggestions for you. Really appreciate it.

[Dr. Janine Domingues]: Thank you.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Our next speaker is Dr. Karyn Riddle. She is the Robert Taylor professor in Strategic Communication in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her research focuses on the psychology of media effects, especially violent media effects. Take it away, Karen.

[Dr. Karyn Riddle]: Well, thank you everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here today talking about this important topic, and what I’m going to present today is some research I recently did which looked at just how violent child and adolescent targeted television and movies are. Now, the first question you might ask is, “Why do we care? Why do we need to know just how violent TV and movies and video games are?” Presumably we care because we think we suspect that those violent images have some kind of effect on children and adolescents and worry that that effect is negative. Now, the effect that gets talked about a lot, especially in the wake of what happened last week in Texas, is are video games, violent video games, movies and TV shows link to these mass shootings? I am not aware of any study that links individual levels of violent video game or media use to mass shootings and really violent crime. To be fair, that research is very difficult to do. It is hard to collect a sample of people with a propensity for that level of violence. The factors that caused that level of violence are complex. From an ethical standpoint, we can’t put someone in a scenario where they might, from a cause and effect standpoint, behave violently. So I am not aware of any research that links violent video games to truly violent crime like mass shootings. That said, there are hundreds of studies linking violent video games, movies and TV shows to other outcomes that you as a parent might want to prevent in your child. So there are studies connecting violent media to decreases in empathy, increases of being desensitized to violence, fear. Janine’s presentation just talked about this in the context of news, but we find the similar effects in reaction to violence in entertainment. Violence in the media is connected to aggression and anger and frustration. In terms of aggression, professor Craig Anderson will talk a little bit more about that research when his presentation comes up. We’re talking here about physical aggression that’s not the level of school shooter, mass murder, but more I like to think of it as like playground types of aggression, physical aggressions that could harm people physically but doesn’t rise to the level of, you know, violent mass murder. So we do see many studies from different methods and different labs connecting violent media use to these types of outcomes. And so therefore, we might want to know, okay, so just how violent are television programs, movies, video games and what does that violence look like? So I recently did a study with a professor at Indiana University, and we collected a sample of 765 TV shows and movies that aired in primetime television. This was around 2016, 2017. In contrast to Janine’s work, we were focusing specifically on primetime entertainment. So news and sports are not included here, it’s just entertainment programing. We did all the broadcast and most of the cable networks. One thing to note is that most of the programs and movies that we coded are streaming, most of them are available on Disney Plus. We didn’t though code things that are unique to streaming. So for example, Stranger Things is only available via streaming. And so we didn’t code those types of programs, we coded the things that originate on broadcast and cable. And we watched these 765 TV shows and movies in their entirety. These are things targeting adults and kids, they are things that have violence and some don’t. But we really then put a spotlight on the, within that 765 shows, the things that are targeting child and adolescents. So we used IMDB to figure out what programs and movies are targeting kids, and then we compared it to the shows and the movies that are targeting adults. And so here’s some of our results. This is just the percent of the movies or the TV shows that contain violence. I’ll tell you that our definition for violence, and different scholars tend to use some different definitions, ours was an intentional act to harm somebody or some entity physically. It had to be intentional. It has to be physical. It doesn’t have to be hugely harmful, it doesn’t have to result in death or blood or gore. But we did measure those as well, and I’ll get to that. So you can see in this table here on the left that the TV shows and movies targeting kids and adolescents in primetime, 76% of them have at least one act of violence, whereas shows targeting adults, it’s less, it’s about 66%. And those are statistically different from one another. Now, we were replicating a study that did the same thing 20 years ago, so we were able to look at changes over time. And what we found is that in general, there are much fewer television programs targeting children in primetime than there was in the past. And within those shows, there’s less violence. However, what we’re seeing is the number of movies in primetime television increasing significantly and the violence in those movies increasing significantly, including these movies that are targeting children are more and more violent than they were in the past. Now you’re wondering, probably wondering, well, what movies are we talking about here? We’re talking about Harry Potter. We’re talking about cars. We’re talking about The Avengers. And so you might be thinking, okay, well, this isn’t, we’re not talking about John Wick. That’s not what young kids typically are watching. And that is true. I will say John Wick was in our sample and we coded it. It was in the top ten of the most violent movies in our sample, but above it was Lord of the Rings, and below it, having fewer acts of violence was Return of the Jedi. So now you’re probably thinking to yourself, okay, but not all violence is the same. John Wick violence is not the same as the violence in, say, Return of the Jedi, and that is indeed true. So another thing that we quoted was how often the violence in these shows and movies is in a fantasy context or animated. So you can see here again, the yellow bar lines are, these are the TV shows and movies targeting kids and gray are the TV shows and movies targeting adults. So shows and movies targeting kids when they’re violent are much more likely than the adult shows to be in a fantasy context. But you’ll still see the numbers are probably surprisingly lower than you might think where it’s only about 40% of the shows even targeting kids that have violence are in a fantasy context. We saw a significant reduction in animation in general in primetime. Animated violence is much more common in kid targeted shows versus adults, of course, but it’s much lower than you might presume. And then interestingly, we also coded for what percent of the time is the violence lethal? And statistically, these are the same. So whether it’s an adult show or a kid’s show, the violence is resulting in death to an equal degree. So that raises the question, how comforted should we be by the fact that some of this violence is in a fantasy, animated context? And the answer to that is, similar to Janine’s presentations in some regards, depends on the age of the child. For kids six and under, you know, there’s not that much of a distinction between fantasy and reality. These are the kids that are believing the tooth fairy, depending on their religion, of course, might believe in Santa Claus. The picture on the right is my now 17 year old son. When he was two, we went to go meet the real Winnie the Pooh. So not only is there a real Winnie the Pooh, he lives in Anaheim and you could go see him on a Tuesday afternoon. So for these young kids, there isn’t really a difference between fantasy and reality. And in fact, you know, a network like PBS is really predicated on the assumption that children can learn. Young children can learn from animation. They can learn from Clifford. They can learn from the WildKratz and Daniel Tiger and Dinosaur Train. They can learn pro-social, positive behaviors from animation. And so by that same token, depending on what’s in the program, they could also learn antisocial things as well. Now, with older kids, once you’re seven or eight, you realize, okay, the gig is up. In terms of the tooth fairy, they’re starting to understand the difference between fantasy and reality, and so they know what’s real and what’s fake from around seven and eight and older. But I want to encourage parents to think about some things that matter beyond the realism, meaning, we shouldn’t just discount something that’s fantasy or animation as being fine for our older kids. For example, here’s some more results of our study. So this is within specifically the kid and adolescent targeted programs and movies that have violence. So 40% of the time in those movies, the violence is paired with humor, it’s made to be funny. About 35% of the time, the violence is accompanied with no punishments, so the person doesn’t face a reprimand or go to jail or get kicked out of school. So a third of the time, there’s no punishment and a third of the time there’s even a reward present like applause or they gain something for their violence. Another thing that we coded in our 765 shows was whether a movie with violence had an anti-violence theme, which means throughout the entire movie or TV show, do you come away from it with a sense, you know, violence is serious. It has negative consequences that are real and painful and does the movie or TV show teach an anti violence theme? This is not a typo here in that percent in kids shows was zero. 0% had an anti-violence theme and within adult shows it was only 5%. And 20 years ago it was around 3%. So it was up a little, but not much. One final thing I want to talk about is this issue of blood and gore. So in surveys I’ve done of parents, it seems like the number one thing that they’re looking at when they’re deciding whether their child can watch a violent movie or play a violent video game, it seems like the number one factor is it bloody or is it not? And if it’s bloody, they don’t want their kids to watch it or play it. And if it’s not, they’re okay with it. So with when our sample of our TV shows we looked at in movies, what percent of the time the violence was presented with any amount of blood and gore? And you can see, indeed, for the movies targeting children and adolescents only 15% of the time are the movies having blood and gore and 35% of the movies targeting adults had that so much more likely to encounter blood and gore in a movie targeting adults. And this is probably why many parents are fine, are okay with some franchises that have a lot of violence and fighting in them like a Harry Potter or Star Wars, because those tend to be pretty sanitized. There’s not a lot of blood and gore in those films. And I think, you know, it’s completely fine if parents want to minimize their child’s exposure to blood and gore. I think that’s a great decision and a fine thing to do. But one of the things I’ve been telling parents is to look beyond blood and gore to the broader message, even if the program is animated, even if it’s in a fantasy portrayal. What’s the broader message that it’s sending? Does it present alternatives to violence? You can deal with your bully, for example, by punching him or maybe there’s a nonviolent solution to that. Do movies or TV shows that your kids are watching present that? Do the movies and TV shows your kids are watching show realistic harms of violence so they come to appreciate the reality of what it means to be a victim of violence or be involved in violence in any way. Does it show negative consequences? We know that people are deterred and children can be deterred from imitation if they think they’re going to face a negative consequence and they’re more likely to imitate things they see in the media if they think they’re going to be rewarded. So what do the TV shows and movies your kids watch show in terms of rewards and consequences? And do these movies mock violence and make it seem like it’s funny or not a big deal? And is that the kind of message that you want your children to see? So, again, the advice I usually give is that it’s totally appropriate to look at the amount of blood and gore in a movie and deciding whether or not you want your child to see it. But I would encourage parents to look at other things as well and not assume that non bloody, non graphic movies are are necessarily appropriate for your children. And that’s what I have for today.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you very much, Karen. That’s a much needed update on this important content analysis that was conducted 20 years ago. We do have time for a quick question. Are there any studies, past or present, that have hard data to prove this topic?

[Dr. Karyn Riddle]: Yeah, great question. I think that’s what parents and the public really want to know. And I started off the presentation by saying, you know, we care about the amount of violence in movies and TV shows because we presume that they have an effect. And in fact, there have been hundreds and hundreds of studies demonstrating these effects. This research was very popular and prolific in the eighties and nineties, but goes way back to the sixties and even before that and continues today. It’s important to know that there’s many scholars across the country and across the world, really, who are doing this research. And so it comes from different labs, different perspectives, different methods, all kind of converging on a similar pattern. So within our presentation today, Brad and Craig are chief among the researchers doing this but there’s also scholars at the University of Minnesota and the University of Pennsylvania, Wake Forest, USC. Many people are doing this research. And like I said, it’s important that they all take slightly different methods and different approaches because there’s no one right way or correct way or easy way to study violence and aggression. It’s a complicated topic, and measuring aggression is very, very difficult to do. So these studies, and I think Craig will talk about this as well, use different measures that you can, in a laboratory, ethically use to assess whether or not a violent show or movie or video game is increasing the likelihood of aggression. And again, no one study is the final definitive word on media violence and its effects, but what we have is decades of many, many studies that are pointing to a pattern. Again, not to say that media violence is creating school shooters, but rather these other effects that we’ve been looking at; decreases in empathy, increases in aggression, increases in desensitization.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Our next panelist is Dr. Craig Anderson. He is a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University. He’s an expert on violent media effects and also the winner of the Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Media, Psychology and Technology Award from the American Psychological Association. Take it away, Craig.

[Dr. Craig Anderson]: Let’s kind of jump into it. Previous speakers that actually addressed some of these questions but I did want to just hit really quickly definitions in this research domain. So when we talk about aggression, when social behavioral scientists talk about aggression, we specifically mean behavior that is intended to harm a person who does not wish to be harmed. And when we talk about violence, we really mean a severe form of physical aggression, severe enough to require medical attention. By media violence, the definition is much less, and actually, as Karyn mentioned, it has to do with media portrayals of intentionally harmful behavior directed at real or imaginary characters that can be human or non-human. So we have cartoonish characters and, you know, all sorts of things. Yeah. I’m going to kind of run through this fairly quickly. But as others have pointed out, you know, there have been hundreds of studies on screen media violence, including video games. And I’m going to focus primarily on video games today. But these hundreds of studies over multiple decades show two main results. First of all, there’s a short term, very brief exposure increases aggressive behavior immediately afterwards. So if you play violent video game or a kid child, adolescent, whatever, plays a violent video game for 15, 20 minutes or so, the likelihood of them behaving aggressively afterwards increases at least for a short period of time. Here, you know, in one study conducted a number of years, a violent video game study, children who were who were randomly assigned to play either violent or nonviolent video game and then were put in a situation where they thought they could actually harm another child who was provoking them. They didn’t actually harm another child, but they thought that they would. The very violent game increased aggressive behavior by 47%. And I should point out that these games were cartoonish children, friendly, rated games. And that in that same study, we had college students play those same games and we found a 43% increase in aggression among the college students. All right. So it’s not like adults are distinguishing between realism, you know, realistic violence or not matters a whole lot. The second main result is that long term exposure, that is frequent exposure to media violence, including violent video games, can increase aggression over time. Some of the early TV studies that have followed up the same group of people for over 30 years now shows that those effects last into adulthood. Specific to violent video games, one of the first longitudinal studies showed that high exposure to violent video games at one point in time led to roughly 20% increase in fights at school for third, fourth and fifth graders. Okay. I guess another point that’s worth making here is that behavioral scientists have understood the underlying causal processes and mechanisms for quite some time, at least two decades, and in a lot goes back even farther. More recent research has led to refinement of some of those theories, but basically, you know, this is a well understood phenomenon. This isn’t, you know, some kind of weird thing. What I want to show here just real quickly, are the ways in which violent screen media, which, again, I’m focusing particularly on violent video games, but it actually holds for everything TV, movies, social media, how does that lead to aggressive behavior? Well, there are several ways that are actually well-established effects. So aggressive thinking; violent screen media use playing violent video game increases, aggressive thinking or what we call aggressive cognition, increases aggressive emotion or affect, leads to a physiological desensitization to violence, leads to increased physiological arousal –at least in the short term– that can then increase aggressive behavior, and also leads to a decline in empathy. There are several other paths that need more research, but fairly recent research suggests that high exposure to a lot of violent screen media use and again, this includes cartoon violence, not just gory stuff, may lead to peer group shifts, which can lead to later increases in aggression and may lead to what we call executive function or impulsivity deficits, attention deficits, including A.D.D. types of problems. Let me just move on here. I wanted to present a few answers to frequently asked questions, some of which have already been addressed. But I want to highlight here the first is that playing the hero in a violent video game does not protect the player from becoming more aggressive. In fact, most violent video games, not all, do in fact involve the child or adolescent playing a hero. But that also increases aggression. Cartoonish violence increases aggression. All ages that have been studied, some roughly age five yo young adults, are similarly affected. Not exactly the same. There are some differences, but, but for the most part, the effects are the same. And as was already pointed out, you know, exposure to violent media itself won’t create violent criminals if there are no other risk factors in that child or adolescents life. But it is one of the many known risk factors that do add up to increased likelihood of violent criminal behavior. And in fact, there are some studies, including some longitudinal ones, that do link violent media exposure to criminal violence, including among juvenile delinquents and and actually up through adulthood. There aren’t very many of them because they’re very expensive and difficult to do, but that does pop up. Public debate about media violence, whether or not there is, in fact, any real harmful effects, I mean, the scientific community has spoken very clearly for decades now so the public debate is really a false debate. And to end on a more positive note. I should also like to point out there are a lot of positive uses of video games. Nonviolent prosocial games, for example, have been shown to increase pro-social behavior both in the immediate situation, but also across time. I’m going to just show this slide real quickly so that when people go back on YouTube, they can find some good resources. So I will stop there.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you very much, Craig. Excellent presentation. We do have time for a question. One person asked,”Can violent video games like Call of Duty teach players to kill others, such as the children in the Texas Elementary School? And if so, how?”

[Dr. Craig Anderson]: That’s a very good question and of course, very relevant because of the recent Texas shootings. Most people don’t know, but in fact, the United States Department of Defense was, and probably continues to be, one of the largest consumers and funders of creation of more and more realistic video games. They created, they funded what was originally called Marine Doom and then a commercial version of Doom was released. And the reason that these, you know, the military’s so interested in this, and this isn’t just U.S. military in fact, military organizations worldwide use video games to teach troops things that troops need to know. And that includes specific skills such as shooting skills, small unit tactics, and as well as sort of creating a view of the world in which using physical violence is a positive kind of thing. Now, I should point out I have no problem with that use of video games for military, right? If you agree that you need to have a military presence at all, and I personally served six years in an Army Reserve unit, so I have some knowledge of that, although it’s so out of date. But anyway, yeah. So these games can teach very specific skills. We’ve recently shown that as few as 10 hours of practice in a shooting game, improves accuracy with a real gun. So yeah, these kids, you know, you get that kind of thing, but you also get shifts in attitudes and beliefs about how the world works. You also learn what we call behavioral scripts, things like, you know, when you get angry, it’s okay to use physical aggression against the person that made you angry. In fact, not only okay, but you’re supposed to. If you feel excluded or like an outsider, picked on, then, you know, an appropriate response would be to shoot and kill them. You know, as Karyn pointed out, it’s very hard, in fact, almost impossible to show a link to specific violent crimes. But in fact, a lot of school shootings, there are specific links to specific video games that enabled that shooter or encouraged that shooter to behave that way. Why don’t I stop going on.

[Brad Bushman]: Thanks, Greg. Our own research has shown that playing first person shooters that reward headshots, influence participants to aim for the head when they fire a realistic gun. So which is consistent with what you’re saying.

[Dr. Craig Anderson]: And I might just jump in there. The Paducah, Kentucky, Kentucky killings, school shootings by a student in 1998. The shooter had never handled a real gun prior to doing the school shooting. But as one military person pointed out at the time that this kid went, by practicing all these video games, he learned to do headshots with an amazing level of accuracy. So.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you. Our next speaker is Dr. Melissa Sickmund. She is the director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, which is the research division of the oldest juvenile justice research group in the United States. And she oversees several national data efforts. Take it away, Melissa.

[Dr. Melissa Sickmund]: I’m going to be showing sort of the stuff that’s not not actually connected. Yeah. So we present a lot of data on kids in the juvenile justice system, in the criminal justice system, and what happens to them as they go through. But for today’s topic, it seems that information largely coming from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. They collect data from law enforcement agencies all around the country. They collect information on crimes that are reported by citizens to the police. So, you know, you get robbed, help me. Help me. You know, come, come help me. And then they also keep track of when there’s an arrest. When there’s arrest is really the first point in the whole process where we can attach an age of the individual to it. So this is a graph of the number of youth younger than the age of 18, because that’s the age of sort of majority in most states that have been arrested for what the FBI counts as violent crimes, part of the violent crime index. Normally that’s murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. As far as charges, the rape is not included here because the FBI over this time period has, they’re changing the definition to make it a little broader, so it’s small numbers and just confusing to include it. Most of this is aggravated assault. Aggravated assault are, in the FBI’s world, are assaults that either involved a weapon of some kind, a knife or a gun or whatever, or resulted in some injury to the victim. But what we see here is kind of good news. There’s this tremendous drop from the mid-nineties. I don’t know if people remember the fears that were around about super predators, and just, if you lived through this period as an adult, you probably remember it. I think this might also cover a period where media changed a lot in terms of 24 hour cable news networks, etc.. But the fact that the arrests of kids have declined 78% since their peak is is really good, good news. When we break that number apart into its components, the murder numbers are much, much smaller. Murder is relatively rare, although it’s less rare in the United States than in other parts of the world. But see a similar pattern with this tremendous decline and kind of a leveling off, although there has been a little bit of increase in the recent period. And so a lot of media, if we as adults are consuming news media, you know, and journalism in general, they will often focus on this period of increase, which is small compared to what it used to be. The other two categories, aggravated assault and robbery. Robbery is– a lot less of them occur. You know, in terms of kids getting arrested, the aggravated assault is a much larger number. But again, similar declining patterns that should make us happy. When we look at those juveniles as youth, as a share of all of the arrests, kids really make up a pretty small share of the total arrests for violent crime. Kind of the more serious stuff. Murder is low. Aggravated assault is low. The robbery. more than I would like to see, but much, much smaller percentages nowadays than in the past. Kids were a bigger share of the arrests. That doesn’t mean that they were a bigger share of the crimes, because kids are easier to catch; they tend to do things in groups and they’re kids. So this is another way of looking at it by age. When they first started paying attention, sort of 1980 data is this sort of middle line here and you see, you know, things decline as an individual gets older. The ‘94 peak year was crazy up like this and the peak age was like 20-21, and nowadays the slope is much flatter. But what we see is that for adults, 30 and over. Their numbers are actually or the rate is actually higher than it was back in 1980, where for the kids, the gray area here is those juveniles, their numbers are way below what they were for 1980. Again, that’s good news. We can also look at kids and violence in terms of whether they are victimized because kids tend to hang around other kids, so kids reporting victimization. This data comes from the National Crime Victimization Survey. They interview people in households, ask them about have they been victimized? You know, has anything like this happened to you? They’ll interview kids as young as 12 years old. The serious violent category includes the robbery, sexual assault and aggravated assault, doesn’t include murder because you can’t interview people that have been murdered. And then the simple assault, which is a category of assault and fighting behavior, but doesn’t include the weapon or injury. And again, we see these big declining trends, which is good news. Some of the data from law enforcement is actually very detailed and we can tell interesting things like the relationship of the offender to the victim, what type of weapon has been used and time of day of the incident. And, you know, in the interest of what can parents do? Notice that the peak times for violence are sort of after school on school days. This is a time when a lot of kids, sort of middle school and older, don’t have supervision. They’re no longer at school. If they’re not involved in some sort of afterschool activity, their parents may be still working. And so they’re unsupervised and those fights can happen. Sort of the “meet me at the schoolyard after school”. So encourage your kids to get involved in after school activities to encourage the schools to offer such after school activities so that kids are more pleasantly engaged and not getting into trouble. Of course, the more serious end, which we’ve all been very depressed about, you know, of late kids being killed. And this had been good news until 2020. The numbers were have been relatively flat after 2000. And then this uptick, that is a little bit a little bit concerning. I mean, you know, any additional kids being killed one way or another is just is very, very sad. And I’m I have not studied this enough to know why in the data in terms of relationships, unfortunately, the biggest increase is in the individuals with unknown relationship, which is probably strangers, but we’re not sure. Looking at whether a weapon was involved. There’s an increase in the proportion of those homicides that involved a firearm, again, hinting at strangers. Usually family stuff does, involves parents and younger children and doesn’t require a it doesn’t you know, a firearm is not involved. The other type of victimization that is often connected to firearms, though, are suicides. And I think some of the media things that kids consume, you know, I’ve heard these crazy trends about some things that sort of glorify suicides, which is also very dangerous to to have kids thinking about this had gotten to a pretty low level and has been increasing counter to the pattern for, for homicides. And I was sort of surprised that the numbers weren’t jumping up in 2020. We wait to see what the 2021 data will show. This is back to looking at the data from the victimization survey, looking at kids being victimized at school compared to away from school. And, you know, the declining trends are what we want to see the the being victimized away from school is slightly outpacing the the at school for the serious violence. When we look at the the worst of the worst the school associated violent deaths and it’s interesting this data collection includes of course, not just children but adults and things that are not just the homicides, but also suicides. So the top line is sort of everything, all the you know, all of what happened. And to whoever, you know, it was, the middle line is the homicides and the bottom line is the suicides. And this I mean, these data are a little bit stale. This increasing trend is certainly concerning there at the end. But it’s been jumping around so much, it’s hard to hard to tell. And then just yesterday, as I was finalizing my slides, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education released simultaneously the school crime data. They have this graph that shows, you know, for the the the school shootings, this is, again, been kind of up and down. But this increasing trend here is not not something that that we want to see. The Department of Homeland Security has also been tracking these data and their conclusion. You know, even one child shot and killed is horrible. The good news is that it’s actually less likely to happen to your kid than to them being struck by lightning. You know, even though we hear about it a lot and it’s happening way more than we want it to, it’s it’s not something that every child should be going to school afraid. And then I saw this graph in what was released yesterday that the numbers of kids that were afraid of an attack or some kind of harm at school or even away from school, that these numbers had not really changed much since 2009. So even though kids are hearing I mean, the events in Texas recently, we’re hearing about these things constantly and we’ll keep hearing about them every time there’s a funeral, every time there’s a trial or whatever, we will keep hearing about them. It makes us think these things are more common than they are. At least there’s some some comfort in that. Kids are not going to school, all kids every day being very afraid. This is only about 5% of kids that are concerned enough to respond in a survey that they were that they were afraid. Interestingly, the the folks that were paying attention to the these violent and shootings at school, we’re saying that the solutions are not to arm schools and make them like prisons, but rather to make them softer places where kids feel comfortable expressing their core concerns to school administrators and teachers and not having it be ignored or criminalized. So if kids are acting weird and that kind of thing, that they can feel like they can tell somebody about it. Increased information sharing and just the fact that millions of kids go to schools that have no counselor, no social worker, know anybody that they can talk to. And research shows that improving that access to some sort of mental health really can reduce disciplinary actions in school, and, of course, the more the more serious things are. So that’s the end for me.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you very much, Melissa. We’re running short on time, but there is one question for you that maybe you could answer quickly. We hear so much about violence in the streets by and against youth. Are the numbers really down?

[Dr. Melissa Sickmund]: Yes. And maybe. I won’t end there. Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that I always we do a lot of education of folks in the system, judges and probation officers and the like. And I always, always, always try to remind people when I’m showing these national data, it’s national data. It’s like putting Thanksgiving dinner in the blender and you can’t quite taste apple pie separate from Turkey anymore. So, you know, the local data are maybe different in any particular place. And but also realize that that you are hearing things differently all over. So pay attention to what’s happening in your local area and don’t be scared out of your mind because something happened in Texas or Chicago if you don’t live in Texas or Chicago.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you. One thing that’s definitely changed since the 1990s is people are using their mobile devices to film violence on the streets much more than in the past.

[Dr. Melissa Sickmund]: I think it’s a story for a different webinar about community violence and its effect on kids.
[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Before we move into the group discussion, we’re going to hear from Dr. Andrew Doan. He’s a molecular neuroscientist and an expert on video game addiction. Take it away, Andrew.

[Dr. Andrew Doan]: Thank you for having me today. I am a physician, but I have a Ph.D. in neuroscience and also a master’s in public health. And I was asked to come on to this this webinar to give the the risk analysis tool referred to as the Swiss cheese model for analysis. And you can use this on a community level. You can also use it for your family and also for your organization. So the Swiss cheese model is a risk assessment and and a risk management tool where you identify weaknesses in an organization or a system. So in this case, I broke up, you know, the mass shooter scenario into three categories. There is a systematic failure, such as, for example, lack of proper gun controls or having weapons that are unlocked and available to children that are not that should not have access to them. And then another level would be a, for example, a societal failure. So the lack of proper parenting and I know that I’m probably speaking to hundreds of of the choir here because you guys are all attentive parents who are sitting through a seminar to learn how to be better parents. So really, I think the people that need to hear this message are probably the ones that are not on the seminar and in that public debate a falsehood in trying to argue that there’s no correlation between media violence and and and actual violence in the real world. But the the societal failure failures can also be consisting of the lack of a moral compass and then also the disregard of the influence of media violence. And so we see a celebration of the violent events in gaming and media, and that’s affecting children and affecting our minds and rewiring the way we think. And the previous panel panelists have discussed, you know, the research behind that. And then the medical failures. I want to contribute to this because a lot of the research that you’ve heard today are in a sterile environment, in a in a very highly controlled system. So for example, yeah, it’s been mentioned that the games that are used to do the research in children are not the ultra violent games that you are are associated with, like, you know, Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. For one part, it’s very difficult to do that type of research on children because the the IRB or the Institutional Review Board would never approve the exposure to, you know, to children mature only the games or ultra violent games because we know the effects on the children’s minds. So a lot of this, this data that we get are very soft correlation. But as a clinician, I take the data that Dr. Anderson and Dr. Bushman and others have published, and even Lieutenant Colonel Gross Grossman, who is a psychologist, former psychologist from the U.S. Army, and take that information and apply it in the clinical settings. And so the medical failures that I see are that the lack of identification of gaming addiction, period. So something we’re missing out on is that there are gamers to play excessively to the point of sleep deprivation, and that sleep deprivation leads to a psychotic breakdown. So literally a sleep deprived associated psychosis. Now, when you have a Swiss cheese model, you know, Swiss cheese has little holes, but when the holes all lined up perfectly, that is when you get the perfect storm for the mass shooter. So that means that you have someone who is perhaps having a psychotic break down, perhaps gaming induced or not gaming induce that basically has an easy access to weapons, who has a lack of societal support and parental support. That right there leads to the perfect storm. And do we have cases like that? Absolutely. So clinically and I just wrote a case report several years ago where there was an adult gamer who was sleep deprived through 60 hours of gaming. And he went to the sleep clinic asking for sleep medications. And the mental health providers finally identified that it was the gaming that induced a sleep deprivation. So during that process, he became homicidal. He actually made a list of people he wanted to kill. And the violent video games help him to imagine and to articulate in his mind how he was going to to execute that that homicidal act. But when we actually admitted to the hospital, we took him off his meds, we actually took him off the psychotropic means he’s on, took away his video games. He slept and with sleep it actually resolved his homicidal ideations. And so when I look at that type of scenario, I know that that’s only and one when I see cases of shooters online, I have notice there is a huge or a significant amount, I would say, of of reports of sleep deprivation and and lot of sleep. Deprivation can be associated with gaming. So Aaron Alexis in 2013 was a Navy Yard shooter and something that was not reported very widely in the United States but was reported in the U.K. He was playing video games 18 hours a day, hearing voices because he was sleep deprived. And then when he had the psychotic breakdown, decided to go to the Navy Yard and literally killed a dozen people with with his weapon. So I just wanted to present that that model to you all was to they can use within your organization, your community. And I think you can use it as on an individual family basis to where you can identify the weaknesses in in the the controls in the mental health controls, in the medical controls or in these are the way you’re parenting your children, and also, by the way, you’re dealing with firearms in your home. And if you alleviate one slice or you take care of one slice, you actually mitigate risk of having that mass shooter scenario. Thank you.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you very much for those insightful comments. So we have a question and answer. I think Dr. Craig Anderson didn’t show it, but I think he has some data on the FBI active shooter that he can share a slide with us. And then we’ll talk about maybe especially some things parents can do to prevent these potentially harmful violent media effects. Craig, do you have that slide?

[Dr. Craig Anderson]: Yes. So these are very recent data from the FBI. For the category, what they call active shooter incidents. And the data are current through 2021. So what you see is of course, this is as far back as the data on active shooter incidents goes from the FBI, or at least as far back as I could find. We know there are similar active shooter incidents or what I tend to call mass shootings. I should point out about half of these are school shootings. And we know that some existed. But, but in prior years, it was relatively infrequent. And in recent years, it’s become more frequent. Now, as as you know, several panelists pointed out. It’s hard to do research that can easily establish a record that can clearly establish causality. Is media violence exposure related to this in a causal way? And I would never make that claim that, you know, this conclusively proves something. But it’s interesting to note that these shootings started to increase about ten years or so after video games, violent video games became even more popular and more widespread and were and now, of course, such a major part of of socialization of children from the ages of five up to, you know, forever. So anyway, I just wanted to share that slide, although, yeah, one can, one can should be optimistic that the overall violence rate is is going crazy. But specific kinds of violence are increasing at a at a rather surprising rate.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]:Thank you. So a general question that people have asked and submitted questions in advance is, what what can parents do to reduce these potentially harmful effects? Some of the things people have mentioned are things like media literacy, parental interventions. How can parents intervene? So I’d be interested if members of the panel have responses to these questions parents have sent us. I’d love to hear your answers.

[Dr. Melissa Sickmund]: Can I jump in? Because I’m sure my answer will be really different from everybody else’s. Don’t be violent yourselves. Kids are most at risk of serious harm, including homicide, by being harmed by their parents and caretakers. So if you are not violent. Model what good behavior is? I think Janine was talking about it at the beginning, you know, model how to process emotion, how to you know, how to talk about it, how to get through tough things without being violent towards people or objects even, you know, kind of having a tantrum as an adult. You know, we work for an organization that also, you know, juvenile and family court judges deal with a ton of family violence and child maltreatment that, you know, adults are a lot more dangerous to kids than kids are to kids even. So, don’t be violent. That would be my number one.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: That’s an excellent suggestion. Thank you. Yeah. Dr. Anderson?

[Dr. Craig Anderson]: Yeah. One of the things that some of my colleagues and I have looked into is. It has to do with reducing exposure to violent media, including violent video games. And one simple thing that parents can do is to simply remove electronic media from the child’s bedroom. They should not be having cell phones, video games, TVs, and just simply removing those things and moving them into public space within the house or the apartment makes it much easier for parents to actually take control of their child’s media diet.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you. That’s an excellent suggestion, Dr. Riddle.

[Dr. Karyn Riddle]: I absolutely concur about the television and devices in the bedroom. It’s correlated with a host of negative things, including sleep problems, sleep disorders. There’s some research that I as so I’m a parent of a 17 and an 11 year old boy, boys who are very drawn to the media that we’re talking about today. And it’s difficult to find things that are nonviolent. I use common sense media in particular as kind of my own, a resource that I use to kind of assess what a program or movie or video game has in it. I also draw personally from research on something called active mediation, which is really just having conversations with your children. So rather than me, I don’t personally take a I’m going to prevent my children from ever seeing violent media or playing a violent game. I just don’t think that’s realistic for us. So instead, I draw from the research that says that having conversations with kids about what they’re experiencing can be really effective to the point that my children are quite sick of it.
But we have a lot of conversations about, you know, pausing movies, pausing games and reminding them that’s not cool. I know that movie made that look really cool. But in the real world, if somebody were shot like that while they’re running on the top of a train, it would be pretty severe. And to where we constantly talk about, I’m trying to remind them of the severity of real world violence, the consequences you would face if you engaged in that and constantly trying to remind them, like, I know that looks cool, but it’s not. And so that’s a tactic that I’ve taken, drawing from a lot of research that shows that these kind of active mediation conversations can be effective.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: That’s excellent advice. And there is a large body of research showing this active mediation works. Unfortunately, only about 10% of parents do it. So we need to somehow convince the other 90% of parents to engage in this type of intervention because it works, it does work. Thank you. Are there other suggestions for reducing violent media effects? If not, I have a really good question. How can parents convince their children that these effects are real? Like maybe, maybe all of the parents who are listening to us believe the research evidence, believe that violent media can be harmful to children. But the children may not believe it. What what can, I think this an excellent question. What can parents do to convince their children that these effects are real? Are there any suggestions?

[Dr. Janine Domingues]: I would say maybe. I know that sounds like an intuitive way of going about it, but maybe the wrong way of going about it in the sense of convincing. But, you know, not to belabor the point, but I think it it really is just about ongoing conversation and recognizing how, especially as kids get older, like the tween and teen age, between in particular, how influential friends are. And so I would also encourage parents to create a network of parents. It might be helpful to connect with other other parents and have a dialog going with them and just getting a sense of like, what is it that you’re talking about in your house and what are your, you know? So that way there’s like more of a community network that is holding your kids. And that way it’s not just one person but a family, like a network of people that are having similar conversations. And your your kids are hanging out with other kids, you know? And so they’re going to be getting information from other people and knowing what’s cool. And they want to be in crowd and not the out crowd. So I think coming from a community stand might be might be helpful.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Those are excellent suggestions. Dr. Domingues. I think there’s this psychological reactance effect. When people feel that others are trying to control them or restrict their freedom, they often do the opposite. So those are really good ideas. Thank you. Dr. Anderson.

[Dr. Craig Anderson]: In an echo that that conversations with you with your children and adolescents provide, including this active mediation which which again is has been shown to work if it’s done done properly. That all of this is very important and these are ways to, in essence, create or pass along your own family values. And very few parents seem to actually do that in an active way. That is, they tend to rely on their church or the school or something to actually teach. You know what we think of as the positive moral values that underlie any any civilization. There also is some in some movement to to do media literacy courses. Historically, media literacy programs have failed miserably for a variety of reasons, but there are a few that do work pretty well, and they’re the ones in some sense that teach you that don’t avoid talking about values, but in fact teach values, but also teach about the inaccuracy of what people are seeing on the Internet and try to teach them how to teach people, how to tell what’s what’s likely to be an accurate, you know, factual website from one that is not.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you, Dr. Sickmund. Go ahead.

[Dr. Melissa Sickmund]: I was just going to offer a suggestion that one of my son’s teachers did. They, I don’t know. It came about through a class assignment, which, you know, he ended up doing a little research project, taking his pulse and kind of journaling how he felt, you know, winning in certain aspects of the game or losing. The differences between playing where there are sort of live people that you’re talking with versus just playing against the game, but really, you know, forcing him to actually stop and pay attention to what changes were going on in his body and in his mind. He still plays videogames way too much. But I think that that selling point of, yeah, do you realize how this can change the way you interact with other people? What was an opportune moment there?

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you, Dr. Doan.

[Dr. Andrew Doan]: And I would also recommend that people play with their children like they do like with board games. And so if you’re going to be a family that allows violent video games in your your home. And violence can be different degrees. But play with your children so that you can actually walk through a sense of moral compass or actually express some some level of morality with them. Because if left alone, these open world games, such as roadblocks and Minecraft, just search YouTube and the kids will go off and do some horrific things because there are left unchecked with proper boundaries to play with your kids. And that way you can control the level of violence and actually give them a sense of moral purpose in how they’re playing and why they’re playing and have that discussion with them.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you very much. Parental monitoring is one of the best protective factors for aggression and violence. Some people have asked a lot of questions about age, gender and racial differences. And I’m just going to answer those by saying there aren’t many.
So others have asked about regulations and societal bans. Does anybody have any comments about those?

[Dr. Craig Anderson]: Yeah, I do. Basically in the United States, the Supreme Court has ruled that kids have a constitutional right to view purchase use. Any kind of violent media that they want without any restrictions being placed by anybody. This is a relatively recent ruling. The ruling was, I was actually involved in in in that case, to, to some extent. But the ruling essentially was written by the video game industry. Because I you know, I mean, I knew what they were submitting and and all that. And it was just based on it, you know, a package of of lies. But anyway, from so from a from that standpoint, from a legal standpoint in the United States, nothing can be done at this point until some other attempts at providing, you know, legal restrictions actually survive Supreme Court challenge. Having said that, there are other you know, there are things that certainly communities can do, and that local groups can do and, you know, parent groups can do to to. But but from a legal standpoint. There’s nothing in the US. The only thing that the Supreme Court said could possibly be meet constitutional standards is pornography. They might might still be able to limit pornography or limit sex. And by pornography, you know, that’s they’re defining it as basically what I think of as naked body. So they don’t really distinguish between degrading, harmful violent pornography versus sex scenes involving adults in a loving relationship or whatever that don’t really distinguish between those. So. Of course, other countries I mean, we’re the only country that that has such sort of a ridiculous view that we’re more afraid of sex than we are of violence.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Looks like we’re running out of time, but I’d like to give each panelist, like, if you could say one sentence to the people who are attending our seminar, one piece of advice. What would what would you say? I’m just going to go in the order of the pictures I see on the screen. Dr. Doan, what would you tell people?

[Dr. Andrew Doan]:I would say that, you know, gaming is kind of like a medication. There can be good with appropriate use and age appropriate introduction. So the example I give is, we can actually use gaming to numb burn pain and you can actually scrub the burns off of burn victims in adults and children. So because of that, be mindful of how you introduce this powerful medication to your children and it should be time appropriate as well as age appropriate.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]:Thank you, Dr. Sickmund.

[Dr. Melissa Sickmund]: Yeah. Just from the from the data that we see, you know, don’t don’t believe everything you hear on the news or see on the Internet, you know, and god talk to your kids. Great advice.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you, Dr. Domingues.

[Dr. Janine Domingues]: Yeah. Similarly, I would say just going back to to coverage on the news. I think not shying away from discussion with your kids and talking about these events, being the filter for that and and knowing that there are really great mental health resources that provide sort of that resilience and coping that that a whole family can engage in.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you, Dr. Riddle.

[Dr. Karyn Riddle]: I would echo what others have said. Talk to your kids, its so important. But echoing what I said in my presentation, I would urge parents to look beyond blood and gore when you’re deciding whether something is appropriate for your kids. Consider the broader message, the broader themes, and don’t focus solely on whether it’s a bloody or explicit.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you, Dr. Anderson.

[Dr. Craig Anderson]: Yeah. Again, sort of echoing what others have said in their talks or were elsewhere in the question and answer session. Yeah. Get involved with your kids and their their media diet, their media habits, and if possible, expand that to not just your own family, but to families of your at your school or families that, you know, your kids play with, you know, someone else’s kids. So, and I should I shouldn’t do this. But there is a free book, if you look at it, one of my slides at the end that really discusses an awful lot of these issues of free PDF version of the book. There’s also a print version that costs something, but anyway, you know. Share them with whoever, whomever you want.

[Dr. Brad Bushman]: Thank you very much. I’m super concerned about, media glorifying gun use. And I would say if in in the U.S., if you live in the U.S.,the people in the U.S. can own guns. Please lock them up. It it’s a huge concern of mine. I’d like to now turn it back over to Kris.

[Kris Perry]: Thank you, Brad, Janine, Karyn, Craig, Melissa, and Andy for sharing your wisdom and expertise on such a critically important topic. To learn more about all things digital media and child development, check out our website at childrenandscreens.com and also watch any of the previous 46 informative Ask the Experts webinars on children and screens YouTube channel, to stay up to date with everything going on at the Institute and receive the latest news. You can follow us on any of the social media platforms listed here. Please join us again on Wednesday, June 15th for the “Golden Rule: Cultivating Kindness and Character Online”. Which will examine a lighter topic kindness. We have another fantastic panel of experts who will discuss the development and cultivation of pro-social behaviors, both on and off line. This will be our Final Ask the Experts webinar before our summer hiatus, and we hope to see you there.