Factors of Humanitarian and Mass Culture Aggression in Children and Young People

Abstract

This paper presents a study of school-children, from eleven to thirteen years old and their exposure to Mass Media, as well as to Media of a traditional humanitarian culture, like the theatre, books and music. The hours they watch television and are exposed to Mass Media in general, and other humanitarian, cultural activities, are then compared to their degree of aggression, as recorded by themselves in a questionnaire which sought to establish their aggressive tendencies at school and at home. The comparison which takes into consideration the contents and nature of the television programmes the children watch, seeks to trace correlations between the viewing of these television programmes with their self-confessed aggressive behaviour. The paper records the research carried out by the Research and Development Center of lntercol/ege in Spring, 1995, among a sample of 400 elementary and high-school students {boys and girls) in the unoccupied areas of Cyprus