Social Aggression in Children: The Role of Television

Although previous research focused a lot on the effects of televised physical aggression on children, the effects of socially aggressive content received little attention. However, Martins and Wilson gave a new insight into this field in that they did a correlational study on TV watching in which they surveyed over 500 children and found that social aggression on TV has positive relations with socially aggressive behaviors in children. In addition, they also found that the relations are stronger for girls than boys.

Social aggression is a type of aggression that harms the target’s self-esteem and social standing (Galen & Underwood, 1997, as is cited in Martins, & Wilson, 2011) through direct or indirect actions via both verbal and nonverbal means. A survey shows that about 35% of adolescents engage in malicious gossip on a monthly basis (Wang, Iannotti, & Nansel, 2009, as is cited in Martins, & Wilson, 2011). It is also found that social aggression is more prevalent among girls rather than boys (Martins, & Wilson, 2011). Previous research found that TV with aggressive content leads to both immediate

The study is the first to show that although the effects of socially aggressive content on TV differ by viewers’ gender, social aggression on TV alone can give rise to children’s social aggression at school in general. Moreover, this study also led us to understand the complexity of studying human behavior in that the researchers have to control for different moderator variables such as overall television viewing and gender to make sure the result is not a joint work of different variables. This research is also important in that it focuses on social rather than physical aggression and thus increases the scope of the study of the roles certain TV programs play on encouraging aggressive