Exam 7: Theories of Media and Social Learning

Media aggression that viewers see as justified produces greater levels of modeling, and unjustified media violence results in less viewer aggression.

The General Aggression Model includes person factors that will influence a person's likely display of aggression, for example an insult might increase the likelihood of aggression; the presence of your parents might decrease it.

_______ is the direct mechanical reproduction of behavior.

Sociologist Urie Bronfenbrenner said that American backyards were growing smaller and school yards growing bigger, meaning ____.

Social cognitive theory argues that observers can acquire symbolic representations of observed behavior.

Where some research did indeed show a reduction in young people's levels of aggression after viewing TV violence, the more likely cause was ________ rather than catharsis.

Social prompting describes a situation when sufficient incentive is present in the environment to move a behavior up the hierarchy to a point where we choose it from among a number of alternatives.

Media portrayals of violence are almost always in some narrative context, and that context provides information telling viewers when and against whom violence is acceptable. As such, they contain ______.

Inhibition is the mitigation or reduction of anxious physiological arousal in response to depictions of violence, both mediated and real-world, as the result of habitual consumption of mediated violence.

The link between media violence and subsequent aggression has more scientific support than that of the relationship between self-examination and early detection of breast cancer.

Media enter the General Aggression Model as part of a person's developmental/personality processes.

After seeing a TV character arrested for beating up his friend, you are less likely to engage in similar behavior because you have experienced catharsis.

Big Bird on Sesame Street is given a prize because he was able to count to ten. This is an example of an effort to teach children to count by using _________.

Although observational learning can occur in the absence of any reinforcement, whether observers actually engage in that learned behavior is a function of the reinforcement contingencies they associate with it.

The idea that the simple viewing of televised violence can reduce our aggressive drive is called ______.

The 1969 Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior definitively resolved the question of media violence's impact on viewer aggression.

Viewers learn novel responses through simple observation of those responses. Whether the response is inhibited or disinhibited however, is a function of the _____.

The General Aggression Model assumes that social behavior depends on people's understanding of events in the present environment, including their interpretation of these events, beliefs about typical ways of responding to such events, perceived competencies for responding in different ways, and ________.

Inhibitory effects are likely to occur when an observer ______.

Aggressive behavior related to the observation of rewarded media violence is an example of _______.