Reactions to Media Violence: It’s in the Brain of the Beholder

Alia‐Klein, Nelly; Wang, Gene‐Jack; Preston-Campbell, Rebecca N.; Moeller, Scott J.; Parvaz, Muhammad A.; Zhu, Wei; Jayne, Millard; Wong, Christopher; Tomasi, Dardo; Goldstein, Rita Z.; Fowler, Joanna S.; Volkow, Nora D.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107260

Cited by 21 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 77 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These posteromedial areas are involved in detecting and responding to unexpected environmental events with high motivational value that can require a behavioural change646566, as it is appropriate in the case of detecting an angry expression signalling a potentially harm67. More specifically, aggressive individuals with poor self-control show greater activity in the PCUN, whose metabolism correlates with negative emotionality68. Likewise, PCC and PCUN respond strongly when people are asked to imagine emotionally hurtful events that may induce anger69.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Changes in Amygdala Psychophysiological Connectivity Reveal Distinct Neural Networks for Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions

Diano

Tamietto

Celeghin

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

134

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The quest to characterize the neural signature distinctive of different basic emotions has recently come under renewed scrutiny. Here we investigated whether facial expressions of different basic emotions modulate the functional connectivity of the amygdala with the rest of the brain. To this end, we presented seventeen healthy participants (8 females) with facial expressions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and emotional neutrality and analyzed amygdala’s psychophysiological interaction (PPI). In fact, PPI can reveal how inter-regional amygdala communications change dynamically depending on perception of various emotional expressions to recruit different brain networks, compared to the functional interactions it entertains during perception of neutral expressions. We found that for each emotion the amygdala recruited a distinctive and spatially distributed set of structures to interact with. These changes in amygdala connectional patters characterize the dynamic signature prototypical of individual emotion processing, and seemingly represent a neural mechanism that serves to implement the distinctive influence that each emotion exerts on perceptual, cognitive, and motor responses. Besides these differences, all emotions enhanced amygdala functional integration with premotor cortices compared to neutral faces. The present findings thus concur to reconceptualise the structure-function relation between brain-emotion from the traditional one-to-one mapping toward a network-based and dynamic perspective.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic Changes in Amygdala Psychophysiological Connectivity Reveal Distinct Neural Networks for Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions

Diano

Tamietto

Celeghin

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

134

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Violent content has been implicated in evoking aggressive behavior in real life (Anderson and Bushman 2001) and cultivating the perception of the world as a dangerous place (Anderson and Dill 2000). But this type of content does not appear to increase severe forms of violence (e.g., homicide, aggravated assault) at the societal level (Markey, French, and Markey 2015), and its impact on an individual is highly dependent on personality predispositions (Alia-Klein et al 2014). Casting people of certain demographics as perpetrators more frequently than others may contribute to the creation of negative stereotypes (Potter et al 1995;Smith et al 1998), which may put these populations at a higher risk of misrepresentation (Eyal and Rubin 2003;Igartua 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence Rating Prediction from Movie Scripts

Martínez

Somandepalli

Singla

et al. 2019

AAAI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Violent content in movies can influence viewers’ perception of the society. For example, frequent depictions of certain demographics as perpetrators or victims of abuse can shape stereotyped attitudes. In this work, we propose to characterize aspects of violent content in movies solely from the language used in the scripts. This makes our method applicable to a movie in the earlier stages of content creation even before it is produced. This is complementary to previous works which rely on audio or video post production. Our approach is based on a broad range of features designed to capture lexical, semantic, sentiment and abusive language characteristics. We use these features to learn a vector representation for (1) complete movie, and (2) for an act in the movie. The former representation is used to train a movie-level classification model, and the latter, to train deep-learning sequence classifiers that make use of context. We tested our models on a dataset of 732 Hollywood scripts annotated by experts for violent content. Our performance evaluation suggests that linguistic features are a good indicator for violent content. Furthermore, our ablation studies show that semantic and sentiment features are the most important predictors of violence in this data. To date, we are the first to show the language used in movie scripts is a strong indicator of violent content. This offers novel computational tools to assist in creating awareness of storytelling.

show abstract

“…In this study, event-related BOLD signal for violent events was greater in the medial intraparietal sulci (visual attentional regions) [ 30 ]. A study analyzing PET responses to media violence in individuals with aggressive traits demonstrated decreased glucose metabolism in the medial orbitofrontal cortex for both violent and neutral stimuli [ 31 ]. Nevertheless, the brain imaging literature is virtually silent with respect to differences in brain responses to media violence associated with neurodevelopmental conditions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence: heightened brain attentional network response is selectively muted in Down syndrome

Anderson

Treiman

Ferguson

et al. 2015

J Neurodevelop Disord

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

BackgroundThe ability to recognize and respond appropriately to threat is critical to survival, and the neural substrates subserving attention to threat may be probed using depictions of media violence. Whether neural responses to potential threat differ in Down syndrome is not known.MethodsWe performed functional MRI scans of 15 adolescent and adult Down syndrome and 14 typically developing individuals, group matched by age and gender, during 50 min of passive cartoon viewing. Brain activation to auditory and visual features, violence, and presence of the protagonist and antagonist were compared across cartoon segments. fMRI signal from the brain’s dorsal attention network was compared to thematic and violent events within the cartoons between Down syndrome and control samples.ResultsWe found that in typical development, the brain’s dorsal attention network was most active during violent scenes in the cartoons and that this was significantly and specifically reduced in Down syndrome. When the antagonist was on screen, there was significantly less activation in the left medial temporal lobe of individuals with Down syndrome. As scenes represented greater relative threat, the disparity between attentional brain activation in Down syndrome and control individuals increased. There was a reduction in the temporal autocorrelation of the dorsal attention network, consistent with a shortened attention span in Down syndrome. Individuals with Down syndrome exhibited significantly reduced activation in primary sensory cortices, and such perceptual impairments may constrain their ability to respond to more complex social cues such as violence.ConclusionsThese findings may indicate a relative deficit in emotive perception of violence in Down syndrome, possibly mediated by impaired sensory perception and hypoactivation of medial temporal structures in response to threats, with relative preservation of activity in pro-social brain regions. These findings indicate that specific genetic differences associated with Down syndrome can modulate the brain’s response to violence and other complex emotive ideas.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s11689-015-9112-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

show abstract

Reactions to Media Violence: It’s in the Brain of the Beholder

Cited by 21 publications

References 77 publications

Dynamic Changes in Amygdala Psychophysiological Connectivity Reveal Distinct Neural Networks for Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions

Dynamic Changes in Amygdala Psychophysiological Connectivity Reveal Distinct Neural Networks for Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions

Violence Rating Prediction from Movie Scripts

Violence: heightened brain attentional network response is selectively muted in Down syndrome

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About