Effects of prolonged exposure to gratuitous media violence on provoked andunprovoked hostile behavior

On 4 consecutive days, respondents were exposed to gratuitously violent or nonviolent intact feature films. They rated the entertainment value of thes e films. One day after exposure to the last film of the series, respondents participated in ostensibly unrelated research on emotion recognition. As t hey performed a test, they were neutrally or abusively treated by a researc h assistant. Thereafter, they were put in a position to harm this assistant . Both provocation and exposure to violent films were found to foster marke dly increased hostile behavior. These effects were noninteractive. Moreover , these effects were uniform for respondent gender. Compared to men, women exhibited less hostility overall, however. The findings thus show that prol onged exposure to gratuitously violent films is capable (a) of escalating h ostile behavior in provoked men and women, and (b) perhaps more importantly , of instigating such behavior in unprovoked men and women.