Violent Media and The Brain: Just How It Affects You Depends on Circuitry

Previous studies have long-debated how violent video games or movies can increase the risk of aggression via stimulating certain regions of the brain.

Now, recent findings published in PLOS ONE suggest that varying levels of violence portrayed in the media can affect different types of people differently. Furthermore, the effects of violence will vary greatly depending on people's unique brain circuity and their levels of aggressiveness.

"Our aim was to investigate what is going on in the brains of people when they watch violent movies," said lead investigator Nelly Alia-Klein, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Friedman Brain Institute and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a news release. "We hypothesized that if people have aggressive traits to begin with, they will process violent media in a very different way as compared to non-aggressive people, a theory supported by these findings."

For the study, researchers examined 54 men who were divided into two groups. The first group included inviduals with more aggressive traits based off of their history of physical assault, while the second group involved men who did not have these tendencies. They were scanned on three different days. One in which they watched violent scenes, such as shoot and street fights, and another, in which they had a non-violent, emotional scene day. The last day, they watched nothing.
They also underwent brain scans that measured the brain's metabolic activity that recorded the men's brain metabolic activity and blood pressure every five minutes and asked the participants their feelings during 15-minute intervals.

Findings revealed that on the five-day, their minds typically began to wander when they were not watching any scenes. The participants with more aggressive tendencies also showed brain scans that revealed more activity, suggesting that men with aggressive traits had different brain circuity than others.

"Aggression is a trait that develops together with the nervous system over time starting from childhood; patterns of behavior become solidified and the nervous system prepares to continue the behavior patterns into adulthood when they become increasingly coached in personality. This could be at the root of the differences in people who are aggressive and not aggressive, and how media motivates them to do certain things," Dr. Alia-Klein concluded. "Hopefully these results will give educators an opportunity to identify children with aggressive traits and teach them to be more aware of how aggressive material activates them specifically."