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Violent Entertainment Pitched to Adolescents: An Analysis of PG-13 Films

^a Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center, UCLA School of Public Health
^b UCLA School of Film, Television, and Digital Media, University of California–Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California

	ABSTRACT

TOP ABSTRACT METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the violence content of the top-grossing PG-13 films of 1999 and 2000 to determine what percentage of it had potential for negative effects on young viewers and what percentage of it had potential for prosocial or beneficial effects.

METHODS. A large, multidimensional analytic instrument was designed for systematic coding of each act of violence and its contextualization by features that have been shown either to enhance or to protect against harmful effects that are associated with violent media exposure: perpetrators and victims of violence, motivation for violence, presence of weapons, degree of realism, and consequences of violence. Descriptive statistics by genre were performed for each film. An ordinal logistic regression model was used to examine the association between the seriousness of violence and weapons, motive, and genre.

RESULTS. In the sample of 77 PG-13 films, a total of 2251 violent actions were observed with roughly half (47%) of lethal magnitude. A total of 118 acts contained justified violence that were initiated by major characters and were extremely serious, and approximately two thirds of the films (49 [64%]) were rated PG-13 for reasons other than violence.

CONCLUSIONS. Violence permeated nearly 90% of the films in our study. Although only a small subset of this content contained violence that was associated with negative effects, only 1 film contained violence that was associated with protective or beneficial effects.

Key Words: violence • film • media • MPAA rating system

Abbreviations: MPAA—Motion Picture Association of America • FTC—Federal Trade Commission • NTVS—National Television Violence Study • OR—odds ratio

Youth violence is a complex yet commonplace occurrence in American society and involves hundreds of thousands of perpetrators and victims each year.¹ Violent crime statistics for adolescents are indeed staggering. In 2000, 993 youth who were aged 18 years were arrested for murder.² Between 1980 and 2000, 12- to 17-year-olds committed >35000 homicides. During these same 2 decades, young people between the ages of 18 and 24 committed an additional 114797 homicides. Homicide is the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds overall and, for more than a decade, the leading cause of death for black individuals.³

Causation is without a doubt as complex a matter as the phenomenon of youth violence itself. Research has shown that a whole constellation of interrelated individual, social, and cultural factors must converge for violence to manifest itself in children and youth.⁴ The most direct existential method of learning about violence entails witnessing first-hand violent behavior as modeled by family or community members and/or friends.⁵ A recent survey of 28000 sixth-grade public school students in Los Angeles found that the majority of them had been exposed to violence in the previous year.⁶

In addition to direct exposure, a vast and robust body of empirical research shows that exposure to media violence poses a significant risk to the health of children and adolescents.^7–10 This is predominately the case because media representations of violence model violent behavior and therefore contribute to the learning of violence. This is especially true in contemporary American society, wherein the average young person's engagement with visual media in all its formats can run to as many as 8 hours a day.⁸ The 3 most pervasive and detrimental effects of exposure to media violence are (1) increased aggression ("hostile attribution bias"), (2) a heightened sense of fear for one's own safety ("mean world syndrome"), and (3) desensitization toward the pain and suffering of others ("bystander effect").^11–19

The Hollywood film industry disavows any relationship to education and insists that its only commitment is to entertainment. On this point, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been insistent that the goal of Hollywood cinema is temporally to transport and entertain its viewers but in no way to edify or transform them. Social learning theorists, however, have shown that viewers do, in fact, learn from entertainment media.^5,20 Indeed, popular films can act as powerful teachers engaging children and youths emotionally, even physiologically, in ways that teachers in classrooms can only hope to.

Hollywood's self-appointed watchdog agency, the rating board of the MPAA, was designed and launched in 1968 to stave off government regulation of the film industry.²¹ The board is made up of between 8 and 13 nonprofessional raters, including a chairman, who is appointed by the president of the MPAA. It is governed by a code that has 1 articulated standard—"the tastes of the Average American Parent"—and one written rule—"One sexual expletive automatically results in a PG-13 rating. Two sexual expletives automatically result in an R rating, but 1 sexual expletive used in a sexual context is an automatic R."²² The stated goal of the MPAA's rating board is to provide information to parents regarding the content of movies using the following criteria: theme, violence, language, nudity, sensuality, and drug abuse (Fig 1). This board has no executive power, and its recommended ratings can be overturned by an appeals board that is made up of entertainment industry executives.

View larger version (30K): [in this window] [in a new window]   FIGURE 1 The MPAA's movie rating system.

Our study isolated the PG-13 rating category of films that are targeted at American adolescents.²⁵ The MPAA's PG-13 rating category is a gatekeeper and practical construct that is assembled around a disparate set of films that are based on the fundamental warning that defines the category: "Parents strongly cautioned." Despite that the standards for films that are rated PG-13 include the statement, "Rough or persistent violence is absent," in recent years, PG-13 has become a repository for action films. These films are often the largest budgeted ones made by the Hollywood film industry and have also been found to be equally, if not more, violent than R-rated films.^26,27

The MPAA created the PG-13 rating in 1984 at the behest of Stephen Spielberg, whose PG-rated films Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins were so saturated with violence that the public was outraged.²⁸ In 2000, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was commissioned by Congress to conduct a study on the marketing practices of the entertainment industries. In an "undercover shopper survey" of 395 theaters across the country, the FTC discovered that unaccompanied children's access to R-rated fare was successful nearly 50% of the time. As a result, the FTC recommended that movie theater owners begin controlling underage access to the restricted films. In response to this security increase, Hollywood filmmakers began producing more PG-13 films to maximize the potential viewing audience. The box office for the rating category is indicative of this trend. Indeed, the top 10 box office grossing films of 1994–2002 were dominated by the PG-13 rating. During this period, 52% of the films were rated PG-13, followed by R (20%), PG (19%), and G (9%). The PG-13 films grossed 55% ($9.2 billion) of the total box office revenue ($16.7 billion).²⁹

Following the format of the National Television Violence Study (NTVS),¹⁹ we examined the instruction in violence that the PG-13 rating category of films offers to youths, its target audience, by focusing not only on the violent act but also on the contextual features that frame the representation of violent actions. We report on the prevalence, seriousness, and graphic nature of screen violence and its contextualization by features that either enhance or protect against the harmful effects that are associated with violent media exposure: perpetrators and victims of violence, motivation for violence, presence of weapons, degree of realism, and consequences of violence.^19,30

The underlying justification for reporting on the contextual features of violent action is that it enables us to broaden our perspective on the representation of violence by taking into consideration the larger messages that are generated by the films. In addition, the principal investigators of the NTVS study evaluated the reliability and the validity of each of the previously mentioned measures to ensure that they are grounded theoretically and are "consistent with all existing scientific research assessing the effects of televised violence."¹⁹

The questions that we asked were as follows: (1) What percentage of the violence framed by the PG-13 rating category is of the sort that has potential for negative effects on its viewers? (2) Were there any prosocial portrayals of violence in the rating category that would diminish negative effects in viewers or even be beneficial to them? As the juxtaposition of these 2 questions indicates, not all screen violence is problematic. Indeed, some filmic representations of violence produce an antiviolence message. Last, to evaluate the MPAA rating system's ability to recognize and identify problematic violence and inform parents thereof, we asked the following: (3) Do the MPAA content descriptors that are attached to the ratings designation systematically account for the violent content that films contained?

	METHODS

TOP ABSTRACT METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
Study Sample
The sample included all PG-13–rated films from the 100 top-grossing films of 1999 and 2000 as established by the Hollywood Reporter.²⁹ The years were chosen because they were the most recent for which complete data were available at the commencement of this study. No previous expectations were made about quantity or level of violent action in the sample. A total of 77 films were included (31 from 1999, 46 from 2000). Film titles are listed in the Appendix. The analytic instrument was modified from an earlier study and used to capture data on violent action and on its corresponding contextual variables. A character index covering demographics, socioeconomic status, and motivations for violence and scales to measure the seriousness and explicitness of the violent action were modified from the instrument that was used in our earlier studies.^26,31 Questions regarding the presence of weapons and consequences were also used. The genre of each film was abstracted from the MPAA's Internet-based database.²⁴

Two senior researchers from the UCLA Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center served as the coders for all films. The coding used a hierarchical structure that allowed progressive movement from scenes to actions. For each violent action, the film was paused and questions pertaining to the action were answered. Once the coders entered their responses, the film continued until the next violent action. Coders achieved 90% interrater agreement on all variables.

Definition of Violence
We defined violence as the representation of any character(s) who intentionally or unintentionally perpetrated physical force or power against another character or group of characters that resulted in (or should have resulted in) physical injury or death. Because we were dealing with representational action, we included unintentional or accidental violence (most often situated in visceral comedy wherein a hapless victim falls into a trap intentionally laid by a villain) and counted repetitions of violent acts, thereby broadening the definition of violence from our previous studies.^26,31 Our definition corresponds closely to 2 of the NTVS's 3 "key elements": emphasis on behavioral acts involving physical force and harmful consequences. In that we do not define "credible threats" as violence is where our study definition differs from theirs.

Measures of Seriousness and Graphic Nature of Violence
To measure the extent or seriousness of violent action, we used a 3-part scale. Level 1 included "pushing, restraining, slapping, pinching, chases without weapons, and spraying or dousing with noxious (but nonlethal) substances." Level 2 included such behavior as "hitting with a closed fist or with a weapon but with nonlethal force." Level 3 included all "violent acts executed with deadly force."

To appraise the degree of explicitness that was used in representing a violent action, we used a 4-part scale. At level 1, "the act was narratively framed but is not itself depicted or, if depicted, with no wounding or expression of serious force." At level 2, "elements of the act may have been represented, but details of the actual wounding were omitted." At level 3, "elements of the act may have been represented and the actual wounding may have been shown; however, flesh was not shown to tear, burn, be crushed, or rupture, nor were fragments of body parts represented." At level 4, "violence was represented in the most explicit manner, and the actual tearing, burning, or otherwise destroying of flesh or body was made visible."

Presence of Weapons
To capture the presence of weapons involved in the enactment of violence, the instrument provided coders with a list of the following categories: firearms, knives, blunt objects, restraints, explosives, body parts, vehicles, synthetic forces, living creatures, natural forces, and other.

Motivation for Violence
Motivation, or what impels a character to act violently, is the contextual variable that informs the viewer both about why the character acted the way he or she did and whether it was justified. In this study, the motive for each act of violence was selected from 1 of the following 6 categories: protection of life; personal gain; retaliation; to cause pain, injure, or kill; unintentional; and other. Although violent behavior is complex and multiply determined and multiple motivations may be in play in any given act of violence, we selected the dominant and most obvious motive in each case.

Characters
All represented violent actions had a perpetrator and a victim. A perpetrator was the character responsible for provoking an act of violence against another character(s), and the victim was the person who received the physical blow of whatever nature (eg, slap, kick, bullet).

Following the NTVS study, good perpetrators were defined as those who "acted benevolently, helped others, and/or were motivated to consider the needs of others before themselves." Conversely, the bad perpetrators were egotistical, acted "primarily in their own self-interest, accommodated their own needs, and had very little regard for others."

For our analysis of perpetrators, we focused only on the major and supporting characters who were actively engaged in violence for the obvious reason that we were able to capture the most information about them. The character analysis was primarily descriptive and weighted according to the number of violent actions in which each character engaged.

Consequences
Scales for bodily, psychological, legal, and medical consequences were developed for this study. The scale for representation of bodily suffering included "no expression," "the emission of a short expletive or shout without any bodily contortions," "the emission of a sustained cry of pain without any prolonged bodily contortions," and "the expression of prolonged or violent bodily contortions from pain with or without the accompaniment of vocal emissions." The scale that we used to capture the degree of representation of consequences to body included "no representation or only by implication"; "the representation of bruises or slight lacerations to the body"; "the representation of broken bones or serious lacerations"; "bodies maimed, blinded, crippled, scarred for life"; and "dead or dying bodies, fatally wounded, mutilated, decapitated, disemboweled, decomposing."

Realism
Coders were asked to situate each film in 1 of the following categories: actual reality/true story, fiction, or fantasy.

MPAA Content Descriptors
The MPAA's Classification and Ratings Administration board places a hierarchy on its supplemental content descriptors (ie, violence, sexuality, language), which provide the rationale and justification for the designated rating. The first descriptor in a series is considered to be the most significant determining element in the rating designation. For each film in the sample, the ranking (first, second, third, etc) of any violence-related factor was recorded. A film that was rated PG-13 for strong language and violence was labeled as having a second-place violence factor. To determine whether the ranking of the MPAA violence factor reflected the density of violence in each film, we examined the relationship between violence-factor ranking and number of violent acts for each film. The content descriptors were abstracted from the Internet-based MPAA database.

Statistical Analyses
Descriptive statistics by genre (eg, action, comedy) were performed for each film. ² tests were used to determine the association among genre, MPAA descriptive factors, and frequency of violence. An ordinal logistic regression model was used to examine further the association between the seriousness of the violence and weapon, motive, and genre. Resulting odds ratios (ORs) and P values were used to describe the relationship of seriousness with weapon, motive, and genre. The ordinal logistic regression technique was selected because seriousness, the outcome variable, is a categorical ordered variable with 3 incremental levels.³² The data were collected and recorded in Filemaker-Pro, managed by Paradox software, and analyzed by using SAS/STAT software.³³

	RESULTS

TOP ABSTRACT METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
The variables that were examined in this study were derived from our previous research and the NTVS. In the sample of 77 PG-13 films, a total of 2251 violent actions were observed in 67 (87%) of the films (Table 1). Ten films contained no violence, and the remaining 67 films ranged from 1 to 263 violent acts. The overall mean number of violent acts in the sample was 29. Seven films had >100 violent acts (Little Nicky; Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me; The World Is Not Enough; Charlie's Angels; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Mummy; Mission: Impossible 2; and Shanghai Noon).

The majority (96%) of the violent acts were intentional. Roughly half (47.9%) of all of the depicted violence in the sample was of level 3 lethal seriousness, or, by definition, "executed with deadly force" (Table 2). The explicitness of most violent action was level 1 (34.2%) or level 2 (58.7%).

Motivation for Violence
Among all films in the sample, the primary motivation for initiating violence was the need to "protect life" (40.6%) followed by the desire "to cause pain, injure, or kill" (27.3%; Table 2).

Characters
Of all of the major or supporting characters who initiated violence, 23 were good perpetrators and 11 were bad (Table 3). The good perpetrators initiated 187 acts of violence, and the bad initiated 165 acts. Whereas bad perpetrators were primarily seen in action films (80.0% vs 51.3% good), more good perpetrators than bad appeared in comedies (42.8% vs 11.5%).

A total of 299 victims of violence were identified, most of whom were found in action (51.5%) and comedy (32.4%) films. Victims were most often white men and typically not affiliated with any type of violent or criminal-related profession (46.9%).

Consequences
Twenty-three bodily consequences and 1 legal and medical consequence were observed in the sample. Among the 23 bodily consequences, 10 (43%) were in action films, 9 (39%) were in comedies, 3 (13%) were in drama/romance, and 1 was in horror/science fiction/thriller.

Realism
Twenty-one of the films fell into the category of fantasy, meaning that they contained "characters that could not possibly exist or events that could not possibly happen in the real world as we know it."¹⁹ This category included such titles as The Mummy; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Battleship Earth. Fifty-six of the films were fictional, with 2 based on true stories. In total, there were 1351 acts of violence in fantasy films (60% of the 2251 total number of acts), 800 (36%) acts in fiction films, and 100 (4%) acts in the 2 films that were based on true stories.

MPAA Content Descriptors
Approximately two thirds of the films (49 films [64%]) did not have an MPAA factor for violence. The mean number of violent acts for these 49 films was 11 (SD: 24; median: 4), with a range of 0 to 107 acts of violence. Of the remaining films, 19 (25%) had a primary MPAA violence factor (mean: 85 acts; SD: 68; range: 3–263 acts; median: 76), and 9 (11%) had a second- through fifth-place violence factor (mean: 11 acts; SD: 10; range: 2–29 acts; median: 3).

As a point of reference, the overall mean number of violent acts in the sample was 29. All action films with >29 acts of violence (n = 9 films) were labeled with an MPAA primary violence factor, yet only one half of the comedies with >29 acts of violence (n = 3 films) were labeled with a primary violence factor. The remaining half of the comedies with >29 acts of violence did not have any corresponding violence factor: The Replacements (32 acts of violence) carried the label, "some crude humor including sexual innuendo and language"; Little Nicky (101 acts) carried the label, "crude sexual humor, some drug content, language and thematic material"; and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (107 acts) stated "sexual innuendo and crude humor."

Ordinal Logistic Regression
Results from the ordinal logistic regression model summarize the relationship between the act-level variables and seriousness. In 1 unadjusted (crude) analysis, genre was the only covariate. In another analysis, weapon was the only covariate, and in a third analysis, reason for violence was the only covariate. For the weapon variable, responses were collapsed into 3 categories: firearm, body, and other. For the motivation variable, responses were collapsed into 4 categories: protection of life, personal gain, to cause pain, and other. In Table 4, the crude and adjusted ORs are presented for each covariate. The crude ORs do not take into account possible intercorrelations among the covariates, whereas the adjusted ORs do. These results, when juxtaposed against each other, present a comprehensive view of the effects of each variable. The reported ORs are for 1 level of outcome compared with the level just below it. Thus, the OR of 1.33 for action compared with other genres can be interpreted as the ratio of the odds of level 3 seriousness versus level 2 computed for action relative to other genres. The adjusted OR for firearm versus other type of weapon was 38.

	DISCUSSION

TOP ABSTRACT METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
It is obvious that in the complex sociocultural world of contemporary American society, "no single environmental factor can be expected to account for more than a small portion of the individual differences in aggression."²⁵ However, it is equally obvious that in today's media-saturated world, education has become indistinguishable from entertainment and that popular films have an impact on beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge.¹¹ Media effects research, situated in the paradigm of social learning theory, has fleshed out numerous correlations between media representations of violence and real-world social violence. Each of the 7 contextual variables that we examined in this report embody the potential for a negative or positive impact on viewers. In other words, depending on how they support the violent representation, they can have an inhibitory or a disinhibitory effect, can arouse or discourage aggression, or can facilitate the expression of aggression in the individual viewer.⁵

Presence of Weapons
The "weapons effect," according to Berkowitz, has to do with the "priming" of aggressive thoughts and behaviors in viewers, which means simply that viewers get ideas from their exposure to media.^19,34,35 A multitude of other researchers have found that the presence of weapons, either pictorially or in the natural environment, significantly enhanced aggression among angered as well as nonangered subjects.^19,36 Given that >50% of the represented violence in our sample was perpetrated with a weapon, coupled with the fact that most parents are unaware of their potential arousal effect, young viewers of PG-13 films are being subjected unawarely to an enormous amount of problematic violence.

Motivation for Violence
The motive for violence provides the viewer the means by which to interpret the action as either justified or unjustified.¹⁹ The significance of character motivation was also revealed by Berkowitz, who observed in laboratory experiments that when aroused individuals viewed a scene of violence that they interpreted as justified, they behaved more aggressively than did other individuals in the same condition who interpreted the violence as unjustified.^34,37 Most violence in the sample was shown to be justified and was associated with saving or protecting life. Motivations such as self-defense/protection of life and retaliation generally incited the "good" perpetrators to act violently and are accepted by most viewers as reasonable and therefore justified. However, nearly 30% was motivated by a desire to injure another person or to cause pain and suffering. This motivation can hardly be considered justifiable, and unprovoked flights of rage or attacks on innocent targets, the type of violence that are more characteristic of "bad" perpetrators of violence, are usually rejected by viewers as irrational and therefore unjustified.

Characters
In terms of characters who are involved in violence—both perpetrators and victims—empirical research has repeatedly shown that viewers of all ages feel a greater affinity toward and generally identify more powerfully with those who are constructed as attractive, likeable, and otherwise "good," thereby accepting more of what they do as perpetrators and experiencing greater empathy for them as victims. Conversely, characters who are constructed as unattractive, mean, or otherwise antisocial or "bad" are not as appealing to viewers and are therefore less likely to be imitated.^5,20 In this study, several of the lead characters were considered "good" yet modeled extremely violent behavior, thereby serving as potential violent role models for viewers.

Realism
Realism in the context of fiction has been shown by researchers to have a greater impact on viewers than fantastic portrayals of the same violent action.³⁸ In our sample, 73% of the violence was rendered realistic, but the harm in terms of injury or death that it imposes on its victims was either nonexistent or largely unrealistic, potentially misleading young viewers to believe that violence does not have consequences when in reality it always does. Although a number of effects are associated with this contextual variable, in terms of youth, the learning or imitation effect is the most significant and the 1 of greatest concern to parents and society more generally.

Consequences
The vast majority of the violence that was depicted in our sample was inconsequential in terms of bodily expressions of trauma or upset. A consistent practice of elision exists in Hollywood storytelling such that depicted violence is misleading insofar as it pays no attention to the harm that it causes. In light of the fact that studies have shown that the absence of psychological and physical harm in violent portrayals is likely to instigate the learning of aggressive attitudes and behaviors in most viewers, this aesthetic practice is problematic.

Results from experimental research reveal that when consequences to violence are shown, they have an inhibitory effect on the viewer,³⁵ yet only 1 film contained representations of consequential violence that might have a beneficial effect on young viewers. Pay It Forward contained what might be called a prosocial portrayal of violence. At the very least, it contained the sort of violence that discourages imitation. One might argue that it has this effect by establishing audience identification with its young hero and then shattering it when he is stabbed to death by a bully on the school playground at the climax of the film. In addition, the film portrayed the mother's psychological devastation as well as the community's reaction to his untimely tragic death. Such a scenario indeed inspires negative emotions about violence in the viewer. The MPAA described this film as follows: mature thematic elements involving substance abuse/recovery, some sexual situations, language, brief violence. With the exception of this unique film, PG-13 is a frame for what George Gerbner calls "happy violence—cool, swift, and painless," violence, in other words, without any consideration of its inevitable sequelae: injury and/or death and shattered lives.³⁹ This type of violence is specifically organized not to upset the viewer. Rather, violence meets "the specifications for the product—conflict visually portrayable, conventions understood by all, attention-drawing action, and [in the context of television] repeated crescendos of suspense amenable to punctuation by commercials."⁴⁰

MPAA Content Descriptors
The MPAA rating board's treatment of violence content can be characterized as inconsistent at best. True, the board did relatively well at situating violence as the primary factor when dealing with the most obviously violent genre: action. Indeed, action films for the most part were identified as containing violent content. However, the ratings board failed to identify adequately violent content in the comedies. In terms of the 6 comedic films with >29 violent events, only 3 mention violence in the MPAA content descriptions. Because content descriptors are important for parents who are interested in controlling their children's exposure to violent content, this oversight on the part of the ratings board is clearly misleading. Even more cause for alarm at this oversight is that comic violence has been shown to be particularly problematic in that it teaches the viewer to associate positive feelings with harming others.^7,8,41,42

Limitations of the Study
Our sample was not large enough to consider all of the contextual variables that the NTVS analyzed. Furthermore, we examined only 2 years of the top-grossing PG-13 films and are therefore limited by the content of the films that were distributed during that period. However, because there have been no significant changes in the practices of the MPAA rating system, no shift in rating definitions, or any shifts in the film industry, we believe that our sample is representative. In addition, because the study isolated the PG-13 category, no comparison can be made between it and the other ratings categories. Last, because we distinguished violent content and did not examine other factors that are associated with MPAA rating assignment (eg, sexuality, language), our analysis is limited to this subject alone.

Recommendations
First, we believe that the film industry itself needs to reflect on its representational practices and decide which messages it wants to convey to children and adolescents. As it stands, PG-13–rated films include the use of violence as a common means by which conflicts are resolved and stated goals are obtained. We suggest that films that are made for a demographic that is already embroiled in social violence be toned down and that filmmakers begin to make more regular use of the more restricted ratings categories of R and NC-17.

Second, the rating board must become more sensitive to the issue of media violence and acknowledge that the medium that they are responsible for regulating has a learning effect on young viewers. Ample science-based evidence has been produced by social learning theorists documenting the way narrative visual media act as symbolic models and how observation of these models operates as a major mode of acquiring information and knowledge about the social world and which behaviors are appropriate and/or acceptable in that world. Social learning theory should be required reading for MPAA film raters so that familiarity with findings such as that adolescent viewers are most inclined to imitate their screen counterparts, including both the prosocial and the antisocial behaviors modeled by them, would be common knowledge among them.

Third, although parents are often too busy to preview films that their children and adolescents are going to watch and rarely impose restrictions on their media choices as they grow older, we caution them against allowing their children unsupervised viewing of films when violence is identified as the primary or secondary factor in a film or when the word "violence" is substituted with the word "action" and qualified by a generic designation, such as "sci-fi action."⁴³ This synonym is indicative generally of high levels of violence played for effect. In addition, numerous Web sites, such as PSVratings (www.psvratings.com), Kids-in-Mind (www.kids-in-mind.com), and Screen It! (www.screenit.com), provide excellent detailed information about film content.

Fourth, we believe that media literacy education, a discipline that is gaining a foothold in many schools systems across the states, offers a systematic approach to understanding visual media and their messages and the values that they convey.^8,44 In terms of media violence, McCannon⁴⁵ pointed out that a media literacy program that involves parents, limits media diets, and recognizes the value of the media effects research may be promising. Enabling students across the board to engage critically with the essential components of American popular culture using the discipline's emerging framework would be a major step forward.⁴⁶ However, a major challenge for the field of media literacy is that it must have widespread support at the state and national levels, as is done in other countries, to reach its full potentially protective effect.

Finally, we strongly recommend that pediatricians and public health professionals continue to play an advocacy role both locally with educators and school boards and nationally with policy-makers to support the development of a more child-friendly media environment.⁸ We wish to reinforce the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation that pediatricians also take a leadership role in keeping media literacy on the public health agenda and where possible work with entertainment industry officials to develop a content-based ratings system to help parents make healthy media choices. With unified involvement of the community, parents, pediatricians, researchers, educators, caregivers, media producers, and the government, the quest to mitigate the effects of media violence is achievable.

	CONCLUSIONS

TOP ABSTRACT METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 
The findings from this study align with those of the NTVS, which evaluated >10000 hours of television programming from 1994 to 1997. Violence permeated almost 90% of the films in our study and 90% of movies that were viewed for the NTVS. Weapons (other than the body itself) commonly appear in both film and television: >50% of the acts of film violence and 26% of the NTVS programming. In both studies, much of the violence was inconsequential and situated within a humorous context, which is troubling when one considers that this type of media violence is deemed problematic in terms of triggering aggressive behavior in viewers.¹⁹

	ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 
Support for this research was provided by the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center, which is funded by US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant 5 R49 CE000199-02.

We thank the referees and associate editor for helpful comments.

	FOOTNOTES

 
Accepted Nov 28, 2006.

Address correspondence to Theresa Webb, PhD, Department of Epidemiology, 10960 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 1550, Los Angeles, CA 90024. E-mail: twebb{at}ucla.edu

The authors have indicated they have no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose.

	REFERENCES

TOP ABSTRACT METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES

 

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