83 Phillips (1983:560-568) recorded the effects of the portrayal of suicides in television soap operas on the suicide rate in the United States using death records he gathered from the National Center for Health Statistics. He found, over a six-year period, that whenever a major soap opera personality committed suicide on television, within three days there was a significant increase in the number of female suicides across the nation.The major experimental studies of the cause and effect relation between television violence and aggressive behavior were completed by Bandura and his colleagues (Bandura, Ross & Ross,1961:575-582, 1963:3-1) working with young children, and by Berkowitz and his associates (Berkowitz, 1962; Berkowitz & Rawlings, 1963:405-412; Berkowitz, Corwin & Heironimus, 1963:217-229) who studied adolescents. A young child was given a film, then projected on a television screen, the film showed a person who kicked and beat an inflated plastic doll. The child was then placed in a playroom setting and then they recorded the amount of times that aggressive behavior was seen. The results of these early studies indicated that children who had viewed the aggressive film were more aggressive in the playroom than those children who had not observed the aggressive person.The answer seems to be yes. Several studies have demonstrated that one exposure to a violent cartoon leads to increased aggression. During 1971, Hapkiewitz and Roden (1971:1583-1585) found that boys who had seen violent cartoons were less likely to share their toys than those who had not seen the violent cartoon. It seems clear from experimental studies that one can show increased aggressive behavior as a result of either long term or brief exposure to televised violence, but questions still arise about whether this increased aggressiveness seen in these experimental settings show in the children’s daily lifes.FIELD EXPERIEMENTSIn normal field-experiments, th...
