comes up and pushes you off your bicycle. What would you do? The response options included physical or verbal aggression along with options to reduce or avoid conflict. This group found that physical or verbal aggressive responses were selected by 45 per cent of heavy-television-violence viewers compared to only 21 percent of the light-violence viewers. During 1983 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 beha...
