subset of those kids, and then interviewed them again two years later. The adolescents who chose media with a lot of sexual content when they were ages twelve to fourteen were two times more likely than the other kids to have had sex by age sixteen. While the researchers can’t go so far as to say that the sexy media caused the adolescents to have sex earlier, their study is one of the first to establish a relationship between sexual content in the media and adolescents’ behavior. “It’s a very strong association,” Brown says. What in the world were those kids watching? In the early stages of the study, the researchers really made an effort to answer that question.
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irst they did focus groups in North Carolina schools, asking adolescents which TV shows, movies, and magazines they watched or read most often. That turned up a list of titles to use in the media survey. About half of those titles
never appeared on commercial ratings systems such as Billboard or Nielsen. Some TV shows, for example, weren’t popular enough overall to show up on Nielsen, but 80 percent of the African American girls in the study watched them regularly. Then the researchers painstakingly analyzed the sexual content of all these media. We’re talking a summer and fall of twelve graduate and undergraduate students poring over and assigning a value to every scene in seventy-one TV shows. Every non-breaking camera shot in ninety-four movies. Every photo, paragraph, and headline in thirty-two magazines. Every line of every song in sixtyseven music albums. That detailed analysis enabled the researchers to assign each child an individual “sexual media diet score.” Kelly Ladin L’Engle oversaw the content analysis while earning her doctoral degree from Carolina’s School of Public Health. Overall, says L’Engle, now project director of the study, the favorite media of these twelve- to fourteen-year-olds contained 12 percent sexual content. “So that doesn’t sound so bad,” L’Engle
video games and the brain
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an the things we watch really change our behavior? A Carolina researcher has shown that heavy playing of violent video games results in an actual physical change in the brain. Marc Sestir, a doctoral candidate in social psychology, worked with then-Carolina faculty member Bruce Bartholow (now of the University of Missouri-Columbia) to study reactions to various images among undergraduates who said they regularly played violent video games and those who said they did not. Some of the images were neutral. Others were negative but nonviolent, such as a child with an eye tumor. Others depicted violence, such as a knife being held to a woman’s throat. The researchers measured the participants’ P300 brain waves, which occur about three-tenths of a second after someone sees an image or object. “The bigger the spike in P300 waves, the more attention your brain
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says. “But once you look at what that content actually is, you see that there are no healthy messages for kids about sexuality.” The sexual content included innuendo, flirting, double entendre. But very little of what Brown and L’Engle call “the three Cs”—contraception, commitment, and consequences. “Less than one half of one percent of all this content we looked at had what we might construe as sexually healthy information in it,” Brown says. “And we defined that very broadly to even include masturbation as a potentially healthy sexual behavior. “So here we are with twelve- to fourteen-year-olds who are totally into how their bodies are changing and puberty, and there’s no information about puberty, there’s no information about contraception or STDs or protecting yourself against those,” Brown says. “There’s rarely any abstinence portrayed, or any waiting, and there’s very little love or real kind of substantial relationships shown.” L’Engle adds, “There is a lot of talking about dating and sexual relationships in the
is paying to the image,” Sestir says. “You show a bigger spike when you perceive something as unusual or disturbing.” The participants who played a lot of violent video games showed a smaller spike in P300 waves when they viewed the violent images. “They viewed a picture of a guy with a gun in his mouth pretty similarly to the way they viewed a lamp or a chair,” Sestir says. “They’re more numb to it. They don’t see it as being as disturbing as people who don’t play violent games do. “Playing these video games does produce some sort of basic physiological change, but we don’t know what effects that has for the average player,” Sestir says. “The idea is not that violent video games will cause anyone to be a violent killer. But violent video game playing may enable violence to a greater degree. Which may mean nothing for most people. But we’re worried that, for a minority of people, playing these games may incline them more toward serious acts of violence.” —Angela Spivey This study was published July 2006 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.