Percepciones y realidades de la violencia en la televisión
The article presents the interviewees perception of violence shown on television and its relation to violence see in the real world from a theoretic posing and the dicovery of available information on usage, communications means, and violence, from the multicentered research project ACTIVA held in eight metropolitan cities in Latin America and Spain. The results show that cities considered as less violent perceive more violence on television, and there is a general perception of more than a half of those interviewed that television show more violence than it actually happens in the real life. Descriptors: Television/Violence/Public/Empirical research
THE EFFECTS OF OBSERVING VIOLENCE.
Experiments suggest that aggression depicted in television and motion picture dramas, or observed in actuality, can arouse certain members of the audience to violent action. An ancient view of drama is that the action on the stage provides the spectators with an opportunity to release their own strong emotions harmlessly through identification with the people and events depicted in the play. This idea dates back at least as far as Aristotle, who wrote in The Art of Poetry that drama is "a representation . . . in the form of actions directly presented, not narrated; with incidents arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish a purgation of such emotions."
Enhancement of Punitive Behavior by Audio-Visual Displays
A group of male hospital attendants watched the knife-fight scene from the motion picture Rebel Without a Cause. A second, control, group watched an innocuous educational film. The group who watched the fight (the motion picture with aggressive content), and who were then required to run a conditioning experiment, punished errors more severely, using a significantly higher level of intensity of the punitive electric shock, than did the control group.