Television and Social Behavior
As a pervasive media, television has a significant impact on people of every age group. Regular dose of violence, aggression, killing, rape and other criminal activities creates both short-term and long-term effects. Besides the risk of desensitization and development of a violent disposition, television also causes other social behavioral issues. Too much television viewing has been shown to affect active peer relationships. Research on 'mirror neurons' has now offered a neurobiological mechanism underlying imitative violence. There is enough evidence to suggest that television viewing beyond appropriate limits can be damaging to the normal behavioral development in children. Parents should actively monitor and control both the quality of the content and length of time that children watch television.
Introduction
Television and its impact on social behavior has been the subject of intense research over the last several decades. Particularly, the content of television programs and their effect on impressionable young minds of children has been the subject of numerous researches. There is no denying the fact that today's television programs are filled with violence, obscenity and crime, and continued exposure to these depictions and their impact on the behavioral development of children is a serious issue. Violence is not just a feature of movies and daily news but even purely children's programs such as cartoons and animation are packed with a fair dose of violence. According to the Kaiser family Foundation, on an average kids below 6 years of age watch up to 2 hours of television per day while children between 8 and 18 watch as many as four hours of television per day. [Mary L. Gavin, 2008] Besides causing an increased risk for developing obesity and diabetes (sedentary lifestyle) too much of television time also negatively impacts studies and the time spent in playing with friends. (Peer relationships) Therefore the impact of television viewing on the overall physical and social development of children has to be more seriously studied. There is no discounting the fact that television is indeed a good educational tool as well as a good entertainment media but its negative potential cannot be ignored either. This paper discusses the priming effects of television and how it could significantly impact social behavior by analyzing a plethora of research evidence that is already available.
Behavioral Impact of TV
Understanding the causal effects of the violence broadcast in television programs on the behavior of people watching it was the main focus of the 1971 report that was submitted to the Surgeon General of the U.S. The report was based on a review of several researches, controlled laboratory studies, and surveys about television content and violence. This exhaustive research report concluded that television viewing did have a 'causal relation' to behavioral aggression and violence. [U.S. Dept of Health Education and Welfare, 1971, pg 112] The report also clearly stresses that imitation which is one of the behavioral responses of children leads to the actual display of aggression by children who watch content that is rich in violence. As the authors of the report state, television viewing increases aggressive behavior by, "teaching" novel aggressive acts which can be learned and imitated or by instigating aggressive behaviors which have previously been learned." [U.S. Dept of Health Education and Welfare, (1971) pg 62]. Today, researchers agree that television watching causes both short-term as well as long-term behavioral effects.
Short-Term Effects of TV viewing
Priming and Arousal
Priming refers to the activation of brain pathways in connection with an external stimulus and the firing of other brain nodes that are associated with particular behaviors or emotions. For instance a knife can immediately be associated with violence. Thus primed concepts are more likely to result in associated behaviors. In other words, the more a person watches violence on TV, the more likely he is to exhibit violent behavior. Similarly studies have shown that watching television can increase the arousal for an event when it happens in real life. This is due to the 'excitation transfer' which makes a stimulus more powerful making people lose their general inhibition. Such increased arousal invariably leads to exhibition of inappropriate behavior leading to social conflicts. [Rowell Huesmann, (2007)]
Imitation
Research studies have established that humans and primates are instinctively adapted to mimic the behavior of others. Children learn new behaviors by means of observation followed by imitation. Children are impressed and imitate the models or characters they watch on TV. Albert Bandura, the renowned...
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