Psychological research has shown three major effects of seeing violence on television: Children may become less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others. Children may be more fearful of the world around them.. Children may be more likely to behave in aggressive or harmful ways toward others. Children who watch a lot of TV are less aroused by violent scenes than are those who only watch a little; in other words, they're less bothered by violence in general, and less likely to anything wrong with it. One example: in several studies, those who watched a violent program instead of a nonviolent one were slower to intervene or to call for help when, a little later, they saw younger children fighting or playing destructively. Children often behave differently after they've been watching violent programs on TV. In one study done at Pennsylvania State University, about 100 preschool children were observed both before and after watching television; some watched cartoons that had a lot of aggressive and violent acts in them, and others watched shows that didn't have any kind of violence. The first group were less likely to share and more prone to hit or be destructive. Prime time programs average eight hostile acts per hour; children's shows four times as much.People as a society today tend to over react to incidents where children are involved. The problem arises when some demented child who has serious metal problems and can’t define reality and fiction does a horrendous crime and blames all his problems on a show that he saw where two people kill each other. I can see the relevance of this argument but I can’t honestly believe that 50% of children can’t tell the difference between reality and the images they see on television. Without being taught children make their own assessments of the reality status of television programs. The opposing sides of this issue are the parents whose children are viewing the violent ma...
