Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements A Longitudinal Developmental Structural Model

1990 Nancy Huesmann Reed BA, 1962 Penny Graham Huesmann BA, 1963 1943 1953 1964 Louis Huesmann, BA, 1933 Ruth Rowell Huesmann, BA, 1936 1963 Herb Simon Penny H. Charlie Butter Len Eron Bob Abelson Amos Tversky Eric Dubow 2004 Graham Huesmann, PhD, 2005 Kimberly Huesmann, PhD, 2005 1969

The Relation between Observing Violence and Behaving Violently: A PREVIEW • 1) Observing Others Behaving Aggressively Stimulates Aggressive Behavior in Children and Adults in the Short Run • 2) Repeated Observations of Others Behaving Aggressively Changes Children So They Behave More Aggressively in the Long Run including after They Grow Up To Be Adults!

Why does observing violence increase the risk of violent behavior?A PREVIEW • Situational Stimulating Processes (short term) • 1) By priming aggressive schemas, scripts, and beliefs. • 2) By increasing arousal which may be misattributed to something else • 3) Because viewers copy (“mimic") behaviors they see • Observational Learning Processes (long term) • 1) Through the encoding ("imitation") of schemas, scripts, and beliefs promoting aggression. • 2) By desensitizing viewers emotionally to violence

Aggression • Definition • An act intended to harm another person • Some Key Facts • Serious aggressive behavior seldom occurs unless there is a convergence of multiple predisposing personal factors (genetic, physiological, learned) with multiple precipitating situational factors (frustration, provocation, deprivation, alcohol). No single factor by itself explains a lot of the variation between people.

Provocation?

Frustration?

EscalatingArguments?

Indirect Aggression

Aggression • Definition • An act intended to harm another person • Some Key Facts • Serious aggressive behavior seldom occurs unless there is a convergence of multiple predisposing personal factors (genetic, physiological, learned) with multiple precipitating situational factors (frustration, provocation, deprivation, alcohol). No single factor by itself explains a lot of the variation between people. • Individual differences in aggressiveness appear early in childhood (by age 3) and are pronounced by middle childhood. • On the average, the more aggressive child grows up to be the more aggressive adult even into late middle age

Age 8 Aggression Predicts Male's Age 48 Aggression Toward Spouse(CCLS, Huesmann, Dubow & Boxer, 2002) F(2, 159) = .43, ns F(2, 216) = 4.79, p < .009 Age 48 Agg. Toward Spouse Age 8 Peer-Nominated Aggression

Age 8 Aggression Predicts Female's Age 48 Hitting of Child as Punishment(CCLS, Huesmann, Dubow & Boxer, 2002) F(2, 142) = 3.31, p < .05 F(2, 167) = 1.54, ns Age 48 Child Pun. (Hitting) Age 8 Peer-Nominated Aggression

What are the consequences of the fact that adult aggressiveness is affected to a great extent by childhood aggressiveness? • Anything that makes a child more aggressive (even in not very serious ways) is increasing the risk that child will behave more aggressively as an adolescent and adult.

Huesmann’s (1988; 1998) Information Processing Model for Social Problem Solving • Enduring psychological structures • Characteristic Emotional Reactions • Enduring tendencies to respond with particular emotions to particular situations or thoughts, e.g. tendencies to react with rage to provocation or to react with anxiety and disgust to blood, gore, and violence • Social Cognitions • World schemas • Schemas about what kind of place the world is socially, what is usual and unusual, and why people do what they do, e.g. is the world a “mean” place, is everyone out to get me? • Scripts for social behavior • A script is a program for behavior laying out the sequence of events that one believes are likely to happen and the behaviors that one believes are possible or appropriate for a particular situation, e.g. how should I behave if someone insults me, and how will they behave in response, and what will be the outcome of that? • Normative beliefs • Beliefs about what is moral or OK or wrong for oneself to do, e.g. is it O.K. for me to hit another person if they swear at me?

Information Processing Model for Social Problem Solving (Huesmann, 1988; 1998; Dodge et al., 1980; Anderson et al., 1996) Emotional State Situational Cues Schemas about the World Make Attributions Revised Emotional State Scripts Retrieve a Script Bad Script Good Script Normative Beliefs Evaluate Script & Likely Outcomes Modify Schemas, Scripts & Beliefs BEHAVE Emotional Outcome Situational Outcomes Evaluate Outcomes

Given this model, why would a tendency to behave aggressively or non-aggressively remain even partially stable throughout life? • I. Because the social cognitions, emotional reactions, and decision processes represented in the model, once established, remain relatively constant throughout life. • Established by genetic, physiological, or other personal predisposing factors • Established through learning • Conditioning • Observational learning • II. Because the person’s environment and situational stimulations remain relatively constant throughout life

Given this model, what happens when a person views another person behaving in a particular way? • Short term processes • Emotions associated with the behavior and with attributions about the behavior arearoused, e.g., observed injustice arouses anger. • The emotional activation stimulated by the observation may be misattributed to other sources, e.g., a later frustration, increasing the risk for later aggression. (excitation transfer). • Specific observed behaviors may be immediately mimicked. • World schemas, behavioral scripts, and normative beliefs associated with the behavior are primed, e.g., guns prime aggressive cognitions.

Guns as Cues to Aggression (Berkowitz & LePage, 1967) SHOCKS GIVEN

Given this model, what happens when the same behaviors are observed repeatedly? • Long term observational learning • Behaviors and behavioral scripts that are observed may be encoded into the child’s mind and then used later (Direct Imitation). • World schemas and normative beliefs inferred from the observed behaviors may be encoded into the child’s mind and influence behavior later (Inferential Imitation) • Emotions aroused in the child by the observations will habituate with repeated observations, (Desensitization).

Imitation Imitation is often thought of as a low level, cognitively undemanding, even childish form of behavior. But recent work across a variety of sciences argues that imitation is a rare ability fundamentally linked to characteristically human forms of intelligence, in particular to language, culture, and the ability to understand other minds. Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (2004)

Imitation • Appears to be innate; occurs automatically in very young primate infants (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). • Specific "mirror neurons" seem to organize imitation in primate brains (Galese et al., 1996) • Hierarchies of scripts, schemas, and beliefs evolve out of encodings of observed elements (Huesmann, 1998)

Empirical Question: So is there any evidence that social cognitions related to aggression predict aggression and become "resistant" to change as the child grows older?

The Chicago Metropolitan Area Child Study(Guerra, Huesmann, Tolan, et al.) • A longitudinal study of 4,458 children in 8 cohorts who were assessed up to 6 times in grades 1 to 6 between 1991 and 1997 • Children growing up in high poverty, high risk neighborhoods • Children were assessed on their aggressive behaviors, their exposure to neighborhood violence, their fantasy rehearsal of aggressive scripts, and their normative beliefs about the acceptability of aggression at each point in time.

NB 9 NB 11 NB 9 NB 6 NB 8 NB 6 Normative Beliefs about Aggression Crystallize in Middle Childhood and then Predict Aggression (Huesmann & Guerra, JPSP, 1997) .51*** .60*** AGG 8 AGG 11 AGG 6 AGG 9 .16*** ns ns .23*** .20*** ns AGG 6 AGG 9 AGG n = aggression at age n NB n = normative beliefs approving of aggression at age n

Empirical Question: Does observation of violence in the "Real" world lead to subsequent increases in aggression and aggressive cognitions?

The Average One-Year Lagged Relation between Exposure to Neighborhood Violence and Aggression calculated from a Three Level (Time, Person, School) HLM Growth Curve Model for Grades 1 to 6 N=1417 N=1368 Agg T Agg T+1 Expos Viol T Expos Viol T+1 .53*** .39*** .10*** .04 Expos Viol T Agg T

The Average One-Year Lagged Relation between Exposure to Neighborhood Violence and Aggressive Normative Beliefs calculated separately for Grades 1-3 and Grades 4-6 Grade 1 to 3 N = 337 Grade 4 to 6 N = 408 Norm Beliefs T Norm Beliefs T+1 Norm Beliefs T Norm Beliefs T+1 .25*** .36*** .13** -.01 Expos Viol T Expos Viol T

The Average One-Year Lagged Relation between Exposure to Neighborhood Violence and Aggressive Fantasy calculated separately for Grades 1-3 and Grades 4-6 Grade 1 to 3 N = 341 Grade 4 to 6 N = 413 Agg Fant T Agg Fant T+1 Agg Fant T Agg Fant T+1 .25*** .32*** .16** -.00 Expos Viol T Expos Viol T

The Mediating Role of Aggressive Fantasy and Normative Beliefs in Linking 4th-grd Exposure to Neighborhood Violence to 6th-grd Aggression Complete Sample (N = 1,318) Control Sub-Sample (N = 320) Agg Fant 5 Agg Fant 5 .26*** .05+ .25*** .05 Expos Viol 4-5 Agg 6 Expos Viol 4-5 Agg 6 .18*** .12** .18*** .18*** .21*** .25*** Norm Beliefs 5 Norm Beliefs 5 GFI = .966 Total effect of Expos on Agg = .234 Mediated effect through Agg Fant = .013* = 6% Mediated effect through Norm Bel = .037 **= 16% GFI=.961 Total effect of Expos on Agg = .170 Mediated effect through Agg Fant = .012* = 7% Mediated effect through Norm Bel = .043**= 25%

Substantive Conclusions • Repeated exposure of children to violence in their neighborhood predicts subsequent increased aggressive behavior by them and aggressive cognitions for them, but only during later middle childhood. • Aggressive behavior and aggressive cognitions in children generally DO NOT predict subsequent increased exposure to neighborhood violence • Children's social cognitions do mediate some of the effect of exposure to violence on aggression in the later grades where social cognitions have become more stable

Empirical Question: Does observation of violence in the "Reel" world lead to subsequent increases in aggression and aggressive cognitions?

“The most violent ghetto isn’t in South Central L.A. or Southeast Washington D.C.; it’s on TV. About 350 characters appear each night on prime-time TV, but studies show an average of 7 of these people are murdered every night. If this rate applied in reality, then in just 50 days everyone in the United States would be killed and the last left could turn off the TV.” — Michael Medved, Film Critic

Media Violence is Attractive Movie violence is like eating salt. The more you eat, the more you need to eat to taste it. That's why death counts have quadrupled and blast power is increasing by the megaton. — Alan J. Pakula Director, All the President's Men

Short Term Imitation and Priming Studies Do exposures to scenes of violence cause increases in aggression in the short run? Does priming play a role?

Violence Viewing Causes Aggression at Peers (Bjorkqvist, 1985) • Nursery school children AGGRESSION AT PEERS

The Effect of Priming(Josephson, 1987)

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