Quotes from Douglas A. Gentile

Realizing when a diversion has gotten out of control is one of the great challenges of life.

violent content in the film clips actually impaired participants' memories of the products

high levels of time spent engaging in media can have a negative impact on romantic relationships, specifically on levels of relational aggression.

TV repeatedly triggers our orienting response—the instinctive reaction to pay attention to any sudden, changing, or novel stimulus. This orienting response evolved in the species because it helps us identify potential threats and react to them. Media producers use features such as edits, cuts, zooms, pans, and sudden noises to continually trigger our orienting response. In short, they exploit basic psychological and biological mechanisms to get and keep our attention.

when an audience's emotions are engaged, that audience is more vulnerable to suggestion

Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi report that 2 out of 5 adults and 7 out of 10 children say that they watch too much TV. Also, viewers often feel that they can't stop watching TV. Furthermore, while people report increased good moods after activities such as sports and hobbies, they report being in the same mood or in a worse mood after watching TV

Research also shows that children who habitually view highly attention-grabbing media are more likely to have later attention and impulse-control problems, both of which are related to aggression and school performance

Given the findings that television viewers enjoy violent and nonviolent programs equally (or enjoy nonviolent more than violent), how is it that media executives still follow the mantra "violence sells"? The answer: because violence brings a larger viewership

The propensity of research participants to choose violent programs suggests that people are drawn to view violent programs. However, in the end, those choosing violent programs may end up not enjoying them.

Perhaps the public would be better served by reframing the issue of media violence in terms of public health, where we seldom speak of causality (even with smoking and lung cancer) because of the variability among individuals and the nature of their exposures, but rather of alterations in "relative risk.

Early estimates indicated that the average American child or teenager viewed 1,000 murders, rapes, and aggravated assaults per year on television alone (Rothenberg, 1975).

fewer than 5 percent of violent programs featured an anti-violence message. In other words, almost all TV violence is glamorized or celebrated in the storyline.

The media industry's double standard of seeking to introduce digital devices and content into schools as powerful educational tools while disputing that children learn from or are changed by entertainment media: does not square with logic.

Nearly 70 percent of children's shows contain some violence, whereas 57 percent of nonchildren's shows do (Wilson et al., 2002). Furthermore, a typical hour of children's programming contains 14 different violent incidents, compared with 6 per hour in all other programming.

children could learn new aggressive behaviors as easily from a cartoon-like figure as from a human adult, a result that clearly implicates animated TV shows as an equally unhealthy teacher of aggression.

In one study, preschoolers who watched ordinary violent TV programs during breaks at school displayed more aggressiveness on the playground than did children who viewed nonviolent programs over the same 11-day period (Steuer, Applefield, & Smith, 1971).

Aggressive habits seem to be learned early in life, and once established, are resistant to change and predictive of serious adult antisocial behavior.

findings suggest that violent media exposure can produce acute and chronic desensitization to violence by reducing the extent to which the emotional impact of violence is elaborated in the brain.

To be numb to another's pain—to be acculturated to violence—is arguably one of the worst consequences our technological advances have wrought.

the average American child now witnesses more than 10,000 violent crimes (e.g., murder, rape, and assault) each year on television—about 200,000 total violent crimes by the time they are in their teens

Is desensitization a transitory or a permanent byproduct of media violence? Can people become resensitized to real-world violence?

Any act of violence results from the convergence of many risk factors that may include access to weapons, home environment, peer influences, mental health issues, substance use, and social isolation, among many others. Violent media, including music, may be one of those risk factors but is neither sufficient nor necessary for people to commit acts of violence

Those who view greater amounts of violent television and film portrayals of many kinds tend to engage in higher levels of aggressive behavior.

Conversely, the (social and individual) positive effect sizes for homework and scholastic achievement, calcium intake and bone mass, and self-examination and extent of breast cancer are actually smaller than the effect size for the adverse association of aggressive and antisocial behavior with exposure to violent television and film portrayals. Thus, the media effect sizes stand up quite well when compared with those for other effects whether the focus is on undesired or desirable outcomes.