Mental Models: Understanding the Impact of Fantasy Violence on Children's Moral Reasoning

Abstract

This study utilized a reinterpretation of the priming hypothesis to understand the effect of fantasy violence on children's moral reasoning. A posttest‐only control group experimental design was used. A total of 121 children were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions. Children saw 1 of 2 nearly identical versions of a fantasy violence program with the ending manipulated. In the clip, the main character either used physical violence to solve a conflict or the violence was edited out and the main character appeared to walk away from the conflict. A third group of children was in the no‐treatment control condition. Subsequently, children were administered the Moral Interpretations of Interpersonal Violence (MIIV) scale, which assesses children's judgments of violent dilemmas and their reasoning about those judgments from a developmental perspective. It was found that children who saw the violent ending judged subsequent violent stories as more correct and utilized less advanced moral reasoning strategies when explaining their answers. Neither age nor empathy mediated the main effect. The findings suggest that the activation of mental models regarding violence is an automatic process that occurs somewhat independently of other potential mediators.

Triple Whammy! Violent Games and Violent Controllers: Investigating the Use of Realistic Gun Controllers on Perceptions of Realism, Immersion, and Outcome Aggression

“…Mental models can represent both real (e.g., driving) and hypothetical events (e.g., surviving the zombie apocalypse) and are formed through personal, social, and mediated experiences. They can be both applied to media and formed as a result of media use (Krcmar & Curtis, ; Roskos‐Ewoldsen, Roskos‐Ewoldsen, & Dillman Carpentier, ). Thus, in terms of video games, we might have a mental model that tells us what to expect from a first‐person shooter versus a driving game and we may also have mental models about guns or cars that were formed as a result of video game play.…”

Contextual Features of Violent Video Games, Mental Models, and Aggression

“…Therefore, they are flexible in that they both guide and are affected by new information. Mental models have been used, therefore, to explain both our interpretations of stimuli (Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, & Killman Carpentier, 2002) and our responses to them (Krcmar & Curtis, 2003).…”

“…Potter et al offer evidence that viewers' schemas (or mental models) affect their interpretations of violence. Indeed, Krcmar and Curtis (2003) argued that the mental models approach can offer a theoretically meaningful way to understand why fantasy violence affects children's moral reasoning. In their study, children saw a clip in which two characters are arguing.…”

“…Past research on mental models has suggested that our cognitive representations of events or situations, what might be referred to as our mental abstractions, both guide new incoming information and in turn affect existing models to an extent. Therefore, mental models that have become activated through television viewing (Krcmar & Curtis, 2003), or game play, can then serve to influence subsequent attitudes and behaviors. Consistent with this line of reasoning, in the present study, we first controlled for the game manipulation and then examined player perceptions as they related to aggressive outcomes.…”

Children's emotional responsiveness and sociomoral understanding and associations with mothers' and fathers' socialization practices

“…Story restatements or responses that could not be placed into previously defined categories were recorded as "other." In this scheme, concern was conceptualized as the highest motivational response because it involves attention to the mental states of the other, followed by rule-oriented (i.e., authority-based responses), and self-referential responses (Krcmar & Curtis, 2003). Unjustified and other responses were not analyzed for this report.…”