Abstract:

In the past half century, whether media violence has a deleterious influence on the development of children and adolescent that is hotly debated both in the general public and scientific community. In this research area, the social cognitive model, especially The General Aggressive Model, has been occupying a dominant position. The General Aggressive Model that claimed a causal relationship between media violence and societal violence was well known in the academic circles of our country. Diametrically, Ferguson proposed the Catalyst Model in 2008, which interacted genetic and environmental factors (i.e., family violence and media violence exposure), sparked a heated debate again. Ferguson believed the causal relationship between media violence and societal violence was null. And therefore, media violence was a stylistic catalyst rather than a trigger for the delinquency of children and adolescent. According to this model, the development of a violence-prone personality occurs through a largely biological pathway in which genetic predisposition (particularly in males) leads directly to an aggressive child temperament and aggressive adult personality through maturation. In this light, it seemed that environmental factors moderate the causal influence of biology. From this way, we could know that individuals who have an aggressive personality are more likely to engage in violent behavior during times of environmental strain. And such environmental strains could include financial and social problems caused by divorce, legal troubles, and other similar events. Thus, an individual may model violent behaviors he has witnessed in a video game, but had that video game been removed from that individual’s sphere of modeling opportunities, the violence would still occur in another form. That is to say video game violence does not cause violent behavior but may have an impact on its form. Therefore, this article firstly introduced the theoretical perspective from the origins to the present stage, and then showed some empirical evidences of Catalyst Model, divided into three categories: experimental studies, longitudinal studies and meta-analyses. Secondly, with the emergence of more and more new proofs, we stated several doubts about GAM, including publication bias, moral panic and some methodological problems in this research field. Ferguson supposed that the causal relationship between media violence and aggressive behavior was because of the large sample rather than veritable effect. And the measurement of aggressive behavior has long been a contentious issue, which was difficult to standardize. Furthermore, researchers who supported GAM would ignore the third variable which might influence the aggressive behavior, thus overestimated the influence of media violence. Finally we summarized the current research problems and the directions in future. For example, hypodermic needle approach was the main paradigm of media violence on behaviors, however we need to develop some new paradigms of research. From the perspective of differential susceptibility model, children have differential susceptibility to environments’ influence. Some children because of their susceptible factors are more vulnerable that others to the negative effects of media violence, we need to explore how these factors moderated the effects of media violence on the children’s cognition, emotion and behavior. In addition, we need pay attention that media violence is also a very complicated social problem. The conclusion of causal relationship between media violence and social violence should be more cautious which would affect the public policy. Anyway, whether media violence was the culprit or merely a catalyst in social violence, still need to be further confirmed.