desensitisation, disinhibition & cognitive priming

• What is desensitisation?

  The process of reducing sensitivity or responsiveness to violence due to repeated exposure to extreme violence in media
• Research support for desensitisation: Carnagey

  After playing violent video games for 20 minutes, the participants had lower heart-rate, galvanic skin responses when watching a horror movie compared to control group who did not play
• What do Carnagey's results suggest?

  playing the violent video games desensitised the players to the violence in the horror movies
• What is disinhibition?

  people behave in a way that is uncharacteristic or inhibited
• Why does disinhibition happen?

  Normal restraints are weakened (e.g drink)
• What is the psychological change due to desensitisation?

  Children become desensitised to violent behaviour, gain less empathy for victims, negative attitudes to violence weaken when they repeatedly and consistently view aggressive media
• What is the phsyiological change due to desensitisation?

  Physiological arousal to do with the sympathetic nervous system e.g heart rate increases, blood pressure increases, sweating
• What prevents us from violence?

  Inhibitions - these weaken when exposed to violence in media
• Why may violence in media be likely to set up new social norms?

  Violence is often justified as the hero beating up the villain, or as the solve to a problem.
• what is cognitive priming?

  media (games, TV) give us social cues/schema on how to behave
• how does cognitive priming work?

  schema that we form can become triggered in certain situations, and we produced aggressive behaviour we see in the media as appropriate for the situation
• What are 'Scripts' (Huesmann)


  memories for a sequence of basic actions needed to complete a complex behaviour
• When are 'scripts' available?

  in similar situations to when learnt
• Research Support for cognitive priming: BErwiz and Alioto


  after seeing a movie depicting aggression as violence, participants issued more fake electric shocks to a confederate
• what is a weakness of much research on aggression learnt in childhood manifesting into adulthood?

  Short-term research. Do not look at the effect in the long run, only for the course of the study