The effects of social class, gender, and personality on physiological responses to filmed violence

VioLit summary: OBJECTIVE: The intent of this study by Frost and Stauffer was to examine the factors affecting emotional arousal in response to media violence. METHODOLOGY: The authors employed a quasi-experimental design by purposively sampling 150 participants between the ages of 17 and 24. One portion of the sample consisted of 72 white, affluent, unpaid, volunteer undergraduate students (36 males and 36 females). The other portion of the sample consisted of 78 racially mixed, paid volunteers who resided in an inner-city housing project and none of whom had attended college (39 males and 39 females). Measurements employed included the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (assessment of extroversion-introversion, instability-stability, and psychoticism-reality), a polygraph (measuring autonomic arousal via skin conductance response), and blood pulse volume (for comparison with skin conductance). Three subjects were chosen randomly for each session and seated in arm chairs two feet apart in a partially darkened room. There were a total of 52 sessions and six subjects were dropped from the study. Subjects watched a 20-minute exposure to dramatized violence, and were instructed to relax, avoid unnecessary movements, watch attentively and not interact with each other. Beginning with two minutes of nonviolent exposure, the tape proceeded through ten excerpts of violence, including accidental death, male-male assault, male-female assault, destruction of property, male kills male, male kills female, female kills male, female kills female, rape, and rape/murder. Three different versions of each type of violence were used and randomly rotated to increase the probability that subject response would be to a specific type of violence and not to the nuances of a particular portrayal of that type. After viewing the videotape, subjects were questioned about their own use of the media and they were tested for their recall of the violent scenes, also indicating the excitement they experienced while watching the scene. FINDINGS/DISCUSSION: In the skin conductance response (SCR) analysis, neither gender nor personality regression coefficients reached significance, although the main effect for social class was highly significant. The inner-city group was significantly more aroused than the college sample when viewing the violence, and a pairwise comparison of means found depictions of a female killing a female to be significantly more arousing than five other forms of violence. Rape and rape/murder were significantly more arousing than male-female assault, a male killing a male and destruction of property. The blood pulse measures demonstrated similar results. Although there was a difference in the amount of arousal between the two samples, a similar pattern of arousal emerged in both groups. Four of the five most arousing categories of violence were the same for both groups (female kills female, male kills female, rape/murder, and female kills male). The greatest disparity between groups was in the depiction of rape, with the inner-city sample showing more arousal. The self-reported arousal mirrored the physiological measurements on either extreme (female killing a female as most exciting and male-female assault as least exciting), although the correlation coefficient between self-reported ratings and physiological measurements was only.09 (SCR) and -.04 (blood pressure). In terms of arousal, no significant differences were found between the three different versions of a particular type of violent act. For instance, it made no difference in measurements of arousal when different weapons were used by a male to kill another male. Gender was not found to be a mediating factor in arousal to violence, except in the subjective ratings of approval of violent films, for which college females gave significantly lower ratings than college males or inner-city males or females. The most significant finding of the study was that inner-city subjects were more aroused than the college students, reaffirming the theory that when media content is congruent with real-life experiences, the result is an amplification of the media message. AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS: The authors did not provide specific recommendations based on their findings, but added the caveat that this measurement of arousal, with specific instruments in specific settings, had little generalizability. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado) KW - Exposure to Violence KW - Adult KW - Gender Differences KW - Media Violence Effects KW - Television Violence KW - Television Viewing KW - Socioeconomic Factors KW - Sociocultural Factors Language: en