The Images Of Violence On Aggressive Cognition Priming Effect

Media violence has been one of the most extensively studied issues in the social sciences. But among all the previous researches, the violent behavior was usually exhibited by male, female either did not present or usually as victims. Recently, there were more and more productions reflecting female-violence, and the rate of female-delict especially violent misdeed was on the rise, so it is necessary to explore the impact of stimuli involving violent female protagonists on the perceptions and actions of both female and male consumers.Two experiments examined the priming effects of violent pictures on aggressive cognitions, while accounting for the personality (i.e. trait aggressiveness) and media factors (i.e. sex of the aggressor and the motive to exert violence). Experiment 1 tested the priming effect on aggressive thoughts; Experiment 2 assessed the effects from the perspective of memory trends.The results demonstrated that on the whole, violent pictures would prime the aggressive cognition, but this effect was mediated by the person variable and media variable. Secondly, the priming effect was more evident to high trait-aggressiveness individual, and then came to the medium group. Thirdly, the sex of the aggressor and the motive to aggress influenced the aggressive cognition interactively. When the motive is retaliative, the affect of female - violence was stronger than male-violence, especially for girl-students; but when the motive is gratuitous, the affect of male-violence is a bit higher, especially for boy-students. Furthermore, as for the female-violence, the affect of motive to retaliate was most high. Finally, under most conditions, there were no significant sex differences between male participants and female participants. But under certain conditions, as we have put in the second conclusion, the sex difference does exit.