Many television programs involve a substantial amount of violence in one form or another that affects people to think that television is the cause of violence in today's youth. Many have questioned whether television disturbs the minds of adolescent children who can not yet comprehend the truth of fiction and reality. Violent television viewing affects younger children more since their perception of what is real or unreal is not as acute as an older adult - meaning that aggressive adults learned their behavior as children. By watching portrayals of violence, children learn to accept aggressive behavior by becoming desensitized to the effects of violence and imitating it by modeling the actor's aggressive behaviors.
According to the Institute for the Social Research, an aggressive behavior is a learned behavior which is being taught to our children by the media violence that they are exposed to daily (Chen, 1994 p.23). In Aggression - A Social Learning Analysis, written by Albert Bandura, indicates that sometimes watching a single violent program can increase aggressiveness. Children who watch television depicting violence as realistic, unpunished, and frequently repeated are more likely to imitate what they see (Bandura, pg.25). The impact of viewing violence on television may become immediately evident in the child's behavior, or it may surface later (Canton and Wilson, 1984). While violence portrayed on television is not the cause of aggressive behavior, it is clearly a significant factor.
Children "are predisposed to seek out and pay attention to violence, particularly cartoon violence (Canton and Wilson, 1984). It is not the violence itself that makes the cartoons attractive to preschoolers, but the vivid images accompanying them. Preschoolers are unlikely to put the violence in context since they are likely to misunderstand the violent images being portrayed - children cannot comprehend fiction from reality.
