Researchers have found that murder is increasingly being mentioned in films, in a trend they say could pose a health risk to adults and children.
A study found that over the past fifty years there was a small but significant increase in the number of film characters talking about murder or murder.
“The surprising thing is that the increase is not only happening in crime genres, which you would expect because they are violent, but also in non-crime genres,” said Brad Bushman, professor of communications at Ohio State University, co-author of the study.
The team suggested the increase could indicate an increase in violent behavior in films, and called for the promotion of “conscious consumption and media literacy” to protect vulnerable groups, especially children.
Bushman said: “Adults can make their own choices, but I am particularly concerned about children being exposed to violence in the media.”
The question of whether on-screen violence has an impact on viewers has been a topic of much debate. Some research supports the idea that young people may become more aggressive after watching violent media, such as TV and video games, with children exposed to such media becoming more aggressive. antisocial and emotionally disturbed.
However, an analysis published in 2020 suggested that any positive link between violent behavior and violent video games is minuscule, while scientists have also suggested that whether violent films contribute to real-life aggression depends on whether the viewer is already predisposed to violence.
Writing in the journal Jama PediatricsBushman and his colleagues reported how they analyzed dialogue from 166,534 English-language films produced between 1970 and 2020 using data from the website OpenSubtitles.org.
The results showed that almost 7% of the films analyzed contained dialogues with verbs with ‘kill’ or ‘murder’ as the stem. The team excluded cases where these verbs were used in a question, negation or in a passive voice, and other violence-related verbs, such as ‘shoot’ or ‘stab’, were not included.
“It’s a very conservative estimate of the number of murderous verbs over the past half century,” Bushman said.
The team then calculated the percentage of verbs in each film’s dialogue that contained the roots “kill” and “murder,” and took the average for each year.
The team found that while the percentage of such murderous verbs in films fluctuated over time, their use generally increased over the decades – a trend that held true for both male and female characters. While across all genres and characters in the early 1970s 0.21% of verbs in dialogue used ‘kill’ or ‘murder’ as a root, this rose to 0.37% in 2020.
When type of film was considered, the researchers found that the use of murderous verbs increased over time for both crime and non-crime films. Although male characters showed an increase in the use of murderous verbs in both categories, this was only the case for women in non-crime films.
The team said their results were consistent with their previous work, which found that gun violence in top films had more than doubled since 1950.
Bushman said the trend highlighted in the research was disturbing, adding that exposure to violent media could have a cumulative effect and shape people’s view of the world.
“We know that exposure to violent media has many harmful consequences. It increases aggressive behavior, but also makes people callous and numb to the pain and suffering of others,” he said.
However, Peter Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University in Britain, urged caution.
“It’s a huge logical leap to go from counting the number of ‘homicidal’ words in a movie, especially when that count is divorced from any context about why the word is used, to vague talk about health issues,” he said. “It’s not something I would really worry about.”