Violence is everywhere around us, from the rise of the ISIS empire to the advent of school and college shootings and the continuous attacks on the LOC, violence has become a daily part of our lives and leads us to the question why it actually happens. Whenever I flip the pages of the newspaper, I see hundreds of articles on road rage which very much highlight the prevalence of these kinds of behaviors in different ways. The rise in fights was on a different high when I entered high school where people cheered instead of trying to stop the alteration altogether. It always made me wonder why people are getting so excited when they know people can be hurt. I saw the same thing happening in the movies I used to watch at that time.

Coming to the question about the influence of violent media, with my personal experiences, I think it depends on how people perceive what is shown to them, with many people becoming aggressive in their nature, there were some who were able to understand the difference between artistic depiction and real life and therefore found a cathartic path within that. There was a very interesting case in Australian where a man had stalked and harassed a woman for days but then acquitted by court because he had said in his statement that it was what he watched in the movies and this incident somewhat affirmed my belief regarding the general influence of media. There have been studies which show that violent behavior enhances aggressive behavior but there are many which have found it to be a cathartic outlet.

The very first experiment which tried to shed light on this phenomenon was Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment in 1961, he observed that children were likely to violently attack a doll if they had witnessed their parents do the same. In a study conducted in 2006 by Huesmann and Taylor, they concluded that media violence poses a threat to public health as it leads to real-world violence. Specifically, their data showed strong evidence that short-term exposure to media violence in younger viewers stimulates immediate aggressive behavior with their peers at school. Long-term exposure was significantly correlated with destructive behavior beyond childhood and into adulthood. Their conclusion was in accord with Bandura’s initial theory in that the researchers concluded the portrayal of “justified” violent behavior allows children to consider their own violent behaviors appropriate. The researchers agreed that media exposure is not the only factor that contributes to violent behavior, but asserted that it is an important one. Due to numerous studies, the psychological community overwhelmingly supports the notion that violent media exposure is harmful.

The Children, Youth and Families Office of APA conducted a thorough review of the literature published between 2005 and 2013 focused on violent video game use. This included four meta-analyses that reviewed more than 150 research reports published before 2009. The research demonstrated that violent video game use has an effect on aggression. This effect is seen both as an increase in negative outcomes such as aggressive behavior, cognitions, and affect and as a decrease in positive outcomes such as pro social behavior, empathy, and sensitivity to aggression.

In a series of five experiments involving over 500 college students (Anderson & Carnagey, 2003) , researchers examined the effects of seven violent songs by seven artists and eight nonviolent songs by seven artists. The students listened to the songs and were given various psychological tasks to measure aggressive thoughts and feelings. Results of the five experiments show that violent songs led to more aggressive interpretations of ambiguously aggressive words, increased the relative speed with which people read aggressive vs. nonaggressive words, and increased the proportion of word fragments that were filled in to make aggressive words . The violent songs increased feelings of hostility without provocation or threat, according to the authors, and this effect was not the result of differences in musical style, specific performing artist or arousal properties of the songs. Even the humorous violent songs increased aggressive thoughts. The findings contradict popular notions of positive catharsis or venting effects of listening to angry, violent music on violent thoughts and feelings.