In particular, watching a great deal of violent television episodes is perceived to be reality by children (Pinto da Mota Matos et al, 2012). In this regard, children start behaving aggressively after watching a violent TV episode as they justify the themes found in the stories as real (Wilson, 2008). As a result, children who watch violent episodes will try to imitate the character-role portrayals in those stories (Brocato et al, …show more content…
Children also develop fear and worry after being presented with scary, violent TV episodes (Surbeck & Endsley, 1979). It has been emphasized that children use their cognitions or schemata to evaluate and interpret their experiences with media content (Van der Molen & Bushman, 2008). For violent television episodes, children will try to imitate the aggressive and antisocial characters, especially when such media portrayals go unpunished or are rewarded (Pinto da Mota Matos et al., 2012; Wilson, 2008). The findings from these studies are noteworthy because they provide evidence that there is a positive association between media violence and the tendencies of children to act in less than desirable ways, which answers the inquiry questions of this research. Nonetheless, as with all empirical investigations, these studies are not without limitations. Most of them have operationalization complexities and a limitation regarding the type of aggression measurement (Polman et al., 2008., Pinto da Mota Matos et al., 2012). Self-reported data used in the research (Surbeck & Endsley, 1979; Wilson, 2008; Van der Molen & Bushman, 2008) would also cause some bias. The generalizability of results could be questioned also as data gathered focused only a single setting