Longitudinal effects of media violence on aggression and empathy among German adolescents

a r t i c l e i n f o To address the longitudinal relation between adolescents' habitual usage of media violence and aggressive behavior and empathy, N = 1237 seventh and eighth grade high school students in Germany completed measures of violent and nonviolent media usage, aggression, and empathy twice in twelve months. Cross-lagged panel analyses showed significant pathways from T1 media violence usage to higher physical aggression and lower empathy at T2. The reverse paths from T1 aggression or empathy to T2 media violence usage were nonsignificant. The links were similar for boys and girls. No links were found between exposure to nonviolent media and aggression or between violent media and relational aggression. T1 physical aggression moderated the impact of media violence usage, with stronger effects of media violence usage among the low aggression group. Introduction Despite the rapidly growing body of research addressing the potentially harmful effects of exposure to violent media, the evidence currently available is still limited in several ways. First, there is a shortage of longitudinal research examining the associations of media violence usage and aggression over time. Such evidence is crucial for examining hypotheses about the causal directions of observed co-variations of media violence usage and aggression that cannot be established on the basis of cross-sectional research. Second, most of the available longitudinal evidence has focused on aggression as the critical outcome variable, giving comparatively little attention to other potentially harmful effects, such as a decrease in empathy with others in distress. Third, the vast majority of studies available to date were conducted in North America. However, even in the age of globalization, patterns of media violence usage and their cultural contexts may vary considerably, calling for a wider database from different countries to examine the generalizability of results to address each of these aspects. It presents findings from a longitudinal study with a large sample of early adolescents in Germany, relating habitual usage of violence in movies, TV series, and interactive video games to self-reports of physical aggression and empathy over a period of twelve months. The study focused on early adolescence as a developmental period characterized by a confluence of risk factors as a result of biological, psychological, and social changes for a range of adverse outcomes. Regular media violence usage may significantly contribute to the overall risk of aggression as one such negative outcome. Media consumption increases from childhood …