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Brain Mapping Research Five-year-old Ted wakes up early on Saturday mornings and watches Batman and Superman cartoons for hours. Little do his parents know what these programs are doing to Ted's behavior. Research shows that children who watch aggressive programming, such as Batman and Superman, are more likely to get into fights, play rough and break toys.
Direct effects make people want to use aggression to solve conflicts, Murray said. If the cartoons affected Ted directly, he would most likely be the class bully. If Ted were desensitized by watching Superman and Batman, he would think violence is no big deal. Desensitization also makes people less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, Murray said. "Desensitization is the most common way that people are affected, and it is also the hardest to measure," Murray said. "Desensitized people become less concerned about violence in the world around us." Fear is the third way that media violence could affect Ted. This is also called the Mean World Syndrome - it suggests that Ted believes that the world is as dangerous in real life as it appears on television, Murray said. Murray's most recent research involves mapping children's brains as they watch media violence. His study was conducted at the Research Imaging Center of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. (http://www.uthscsa.edu/ric) The Mind Science Foundation (http://www.mindscience.org) funded this research. Murray used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the brain activity of eight children -- between the ages of 8 and 13 - while they watched violent or nonviolent video clips. The material they watched included boxing clips from "Rocky IV," nonviolent clips from a National Geographic special about animals playing, or "Ghostwriter" on PBS, a children's literacy program, and a control video of footage of the letter "X" on a blank screen. Different areas of the children's brain activity are detected by the MRI scan. While they watched the violent clips, the right hemisphere of the brain showed major activity. This general activity and the acivation of the right amygdala (an organ at the base of the brain that senses "threat" or danger in the environment) confirmed that they were being emotionally affected by what they saw. Murray expected to pick up on such activity in the right hemisphere. What he did not expect to see was activity in two other parts of the brain: the premotor cortex, an area used to "plan" motor action, and the posterior cingulate, which stores long-term memories of traumatic events. Murray believes that activation of these two parts suggests that viewers might be trying to imitate the violence that they watch on television and may store these scenes in long-term memory. "We expected to see heart rates increase, we expected to see the brain areas involved in fear or aggression (such as the amygdala) being activated," Murray said. "However, the new data indicates that these children are storing entertainment violence as though it were a significant life event" and may use these memories to guide future action. The findings are preliminary, says Murray because the sample size is small, but he concludes that there are predictable patterns of responses to viewing media violence.
In his next studies, he will explore the brain activations of children who have had differing experiences with violence - such as "victims" of child abuse or "aggressors" who are perpetrators of violence) to better understand the ways in which aggressors or victims process media violence. Murray says he expects that children who have been "victims" may be more emotionally responsive to the media violence, while children who are "bullys" may be less emotionally responsive, that is they are desensitized. A paper by professor John Murray about television violence and brainmapping in children appears in the October 2001 issue of Psychiatric Times. You can view the article on the web: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p011070.html Recently, in March 2003, Murray participated in a symposium concerning kids at risk sponsored by Harvard School of Public Health. Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback participated, too. http://www.kidsrisk.harvard.edu/symposium.html An audio stream interview about brain mapping with John Murray is archived at the Kansas Health Foundation, Kansas Kids Health Project: http://www.kansaskidshealth.org/archive/violence/brainmap
Prepared by Amber Weaver
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