Graphic: The relative strength of known public health threats
"Violence depicted on television, in films and video games raises the risk of aggressive behavior in adults and young viewers and poses a serious threat to public health, according to a new study" (full text) in the Journal of Adolescent Health reported by Reuters.
"Exposure to violent electronic media has a larger effect than all but one other well known threat to public health. The only effect slightly larger than the effect of media violence on aggression is that of cigarette smoking on lung cancer."
The "media violence" includes TV programmes, films and video games.
Huesmann is director or the Aggression Research Program in the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan and editor of the Aggressive Behavior journal.
He was also lead author of an earlier study, Childhood Exposure To Media Violence Predicts Young Adult Aggressive Behavior, According To A New 15-Year Study, published by the American Psychological Association in 2003. This was about TV violence, and said: "Some examples of shows rated as very violent were Starsky and Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man and Roadrunner cartoons."
Results show that men who were high TV-violence viewers as children were significantly more likely to have pushed, grabbed or shoved their spouses, to have responded to an insult by shoving a person, to have been convicted of a crime and to have committed a moving traffic violation. Such men, for example, had been convicted of crimes at over three times the rate of other men.
In other words, it's not just games. However, according to another report:
"Because players of violent video games are not just observers but also 'active' participants in violent actions and are generally reinforced for using violence to gain desired goals, the effects on stimulating long-term increases in violent behavior should be even greater for video games than for TV, movies or Internet displays of violence," Huesmann wrote in the study.
At Ars Technica, John Timmer disputes the paper, which appears to reach a different conclusion from one he reported last year: Meta-analysis uncovers no real link between violence and gaming