Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1983

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Major

Educational Psychology

Major Professor

Thomas George

Committee Members

Kathy Lawler, Priscilla White, Don Dickinson, Larry DeRidder

Abstract

Faced with a level of violence in society that has had a markedly adverse impact on our institutions and our quality of life, scientists and social theorists have offered a number of explanations and recommendations directed toward primary or secondary prevention. Two possible factors in the development of violent behavior which have received attention from social learning theorists are the effects of our society's attitudes toward children and child rearing and the effects of popular media and especially television. It has been suggested that children learn to be violent by watching the violent modeling of corporal punishment at home and at school and the dramatization of violent problem solving techniques by television heroes and villains.

This study, based on a population of 151 male undergraduates, looked at the relationships between the disciplinary experiences reported, past and present television viewing, and the levels of violence reported in the lives of young adults. Further, this study looked for indications of physiological desensitization to scenes of violence based on heart rate reactivity to a videotaped boxing dramatization.

Findings indicate that 11% of the subjects reported having been bruised or otherwise injured by their parents. Only 3% reported never having been physically punished. All reported watching some television as children.

Analysis of variance results indicated that groups differing in severity of discipline and groups differing in frequency of discipline also differed in the amount of violence reported in their present lives. Groups reporting more severe childhood punishment or more frequent punishment also reported more current violent behavior. Social violence measures were also significantly positively correlated with a measure of exposure to television violence during 1972. Groups did not differ on heart rate response to the boxing scene. A regression analysis found that disciplinary effects and television effects were largely additive in the prediction of the obtained social violence scores. Results of this study were interpreted from cognitive behavioral and social learning theory perspectives.

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