Watching television has become an increasingly popular leisure activity in recent times. It has become especially popular among children with more children's programmes available, and the introduction of entire channels dedicated to them. As well as violent and aggressive images that some children's programmes contain, children are also exposed to adult programmes that are violent and aggressive in nature. As a result of this viewing, there are increasing concerns about how these aggressive images affect children's development and whether they encourage children to be more aggressive. Psychological research provides an attempt to address these concerns. One area of relevant research is the proposition of theories to explain ways that children may learn to be more aggressive through watching aggression in films and on television. One theory about the learning of aggression was proposed by Huesmann (as cited in Josephson, 1987) and was concerned with the formation of social scripts. Social scripts are ways of solving problems and are learnt by observing the behaviour of others. The following of a script is almost automatic and tends to be spontaneous. In the case of watching aggressive television, children who watch it frequently will acquire social scripts about aggressive behaviour, and with the right retrieval cues in a particular situation will exhibit aggressive behaviour themselves. Berkowitz (as cited in Josephson, 1987) also provided a theory that could explain how aggression could be learnt. He hypothesised that networks are produced with associative pathways linking feelings, emotions and action tendencies and these pathways can be strengthened through activation. This strengthening of pathways is called priming, and he proposed that television violence can prime pathways so that associations can be made between objects or situations and aggressive feelings and actions, even if the objects or situations are completely neutral. These theories are only useful if they can be applied to experimental research to answer the question of whether television and film violence is harmful to children. Josephson (1987) attempted to test these theories by investigating the effects of television violence on the aggression of second and third grade boys. The boys' classroom teacher was asked to give measures of characteristic aggressiveness for each boy and the boys were then shown a television programme with violent content. The programme included images of people using walkie-talkies because these would be used as a neutral retrieval cue later on. The children were then asked to take part in a game of floor hockey, but before the game they had to give a pre-game interview that was recorded on either a walkie-talkie or a radio. The boys' subsequent aggression level in the hockey game was then recorded. It was found that the violent television content only increased aggression levels in those boys that had been given high scores of characteristic aggressiveness by their teacher. Their increased aggression levels were immediate and were only observed in the pre-game interview and the first three minutes of the hockey game. Also, these boys were more aggressive if they were given the retrieval cue in the form of a walkie-talkie in the interview. The results support the two theories of learned aggression. The aggression-prone boys may have displayed more aggression because the violent images cued the recall of aggressive social scripts that they would have had a larger abundance of than the other boys. The fact that the aggression was immediate also supports the scripts theory. The priming effect is supported because an associative pathway was formed between aggressive behaviour and the walkie-talkie. This study provides substantial evidence for violent television having negative effects on children's behaviour. However, this behaviour is only immediate and it is important to investigate the more long-term effects on children's aggressiveness, as this is of greater concern. The study only looked at the effects of one incident of television violence viewing and did not cover the effects of regular viewing which may produce more permanent priming effects and aggressive scripts. The study provided a detailed evaluation of physical aggression displayed and boys may have been used as participants as they are viewed as more physically aggressive than girls. However, it is important to know how television violence affects both sexes and to note that girls may show aggression in different ways. Coyne, Archer and Eslea (2004) conducted an investigation into the aggression of adolescent boys and girls. They were interested in the effects of children viewing indirect aggression on television and how this influences their own indirect aggression. Indirect aggression is more verbal and often performed behind someone's back rather than face to face and is much more common in females than males. Coyne, Archer and Eslea (2004) found that the majority of programmes watched by adolescents contain indirect aggression and young girls may imitate key characters they observe solving problems using indirect aggression. In this study the participants were only given the opportunity to act in an indirectly aggressive way and not in a physically aggressive way after viewing the aggressive images. It was found that both boys and girls showed more indirect aggression after viewing physically aggressive or indirectly aggressive images than viewing neutral images. Investigating indirect aggression is more appropriate to everyday life. If children see a violent murder on television they are unlikely to copy it because of the consequences, but may act in an indirectly aggressive way instead. It is interesting to know that television can affect levels of indirect aggression, but is there as much concern about this type of aggression as physical aggression? Children may cause more emotional harm to others through indirect aggression and in some cases this may be worse than the consequences of types of physical aggression. Both of the studies mentioned were carried out on children over a short period of time and studied the immediate effects on their aggression. Parents are likely to be more concerned about any harmful long-term effects on their child's development and how it affects the person they become as an adult. A longitudinal study was carried out by Huesmann, Moise-Titus, Podolski and Eron (2003) to address these concerns. They studied children's television violence viewing between the ages of six and nine and then carried out a follow-up study when the children had reached their early twenties. The main aim of this study was to investigate aspects of Bandura's (cited in Hogg and Vaughan, 2002) social learning theory. This theory predicts that children can learn aggressive behaviour by imitating aggressive acts performed by people they identify with. These people could be same-sex television characters who appear heroic and are not punished for using aggression. Another concern is that children may incorrectly learn that what they view on television is an accurate picture of real life and an example of how society and therefore they themselves should behave. Huesmann, Moise-Titus, Podolski and Eron's (2003) study found that aggression in adulthood was significantly correlated with the amount of violent television viewed, the degree of identification with characters, and the degree to which violent programmes were perceived as realistic in childhood. These three variables predicted aggression in adulthood, regardless of how aggressive each individual was in childhood. The validity of this study was significantly increased by the attempt to control other influencing variables. There are many other social factors which may contribute to aggression levels, including socio-economic status, poor child rearing and drug and alcohol abuse, and many of these were taken into account. Even after accounting for these variables the researchers still found that television violence viewing in childhood was significantly related to aggression in adulthood. Huesmann et al's (2003) study shows that we should be concerned about effects on children's long-term development. If this is the case, it is important to try and reduce these effects with a type of intervention. Rosenkoetter, Rosenkoetter, Ozretich and Acock (2004) did precisely this. They wished to devise an intervention program that would reduce the amount of violent television that children watch and decrease their identification with television characters that would also reduce their tendency to solve problems with violence. They also wished to change children's attitudes towards violent television by convincing them that it is less attractive than they originally thought. The curriculum was named 'REViEW' (Reducing Early Violence: Education Works) and consisted of thirty-one lessons of about half an hour each. This lengthy duration was considered appropriate because children were more likely to internalise the ideas presented which would not be the case if only given one lesson. The lessons incorporated many methods of learning including role-playing, reviewing film clips and playing games. The curriculum had a different effect on girls than boys. After taking part in the program, girls considered violent television to be less attractive, identified less with the characters and reduced their viewing of violent television. This was not the case for boys, but their behavioural aggression was reduced. The intervention had positive effects on both sexes but it is debateable which effect is the most useful. Reducing behavioural aggression, as with the boys, is important and is exactly what parents want to achieve in the short-term. However, as Huesmannal. (2003) have shown, identifying with violent characters and finding television aggression attractive are the factors that lead to aggression in adulthood, not childhood behavioural aggression. Intervention programs such as Rosenkoetter et al's (2004) REViEW do help to reduce some of the harmful effects of violent television viewing, but a more effective approach may be to limit or even completely eliminate the viewing of violent television by children. This would mean reducing the amount of violence in children's programmes. Wilson, Smith, Potter, Kunkel, Linz, Colvin and Donnerstein (2002) found that television programmes targeted at children contain more violent scenes than other types of programmes. Because violence tends to be less graphic and realistic in children's programmes, such as that found in cartoons, it is more likely to be trivialised. Children will learn aggressive acts from watching these programmes because the aggression they see is unpunished and has no negative consequences. Viewing a large amount of aggression can lead to desensitisation (Wilson et al., 2002). Desensitisation is where a child no longer has a negative emotional response to violence. Not having this response may lead to lack of emotion when planning or carrying out violent acts themselves, making it easier to perform them. If eliminating the viewing of violent television is something that parents want to adopt then they may want to consider eliminating other possible influences on their child's aggressive behaviour such as violent video games. Anderson and Bushman (2001) conducted a meta-analysis of research on the relationship between the playing of violent video games and aggressive behaviour. They found that exposure to violent video games increases aggressive behaviour in children. Long-term effects on aggressive behaviour are caused by the development of aggressive cognition. This is aggressive thoughts and feelings produced by role-playing as an aggressive character in a video game. The makers of video games would argue that they protect children from more harmful games by giving the games ratings. However, this is not effective because parents rarely check the ratings before buying games for their children (Anderson & Bushman, 2001). There has been extensive research on the effects of violent and aggressive images on film and television on children and overall there is a firm conclusion that these images can be harmful. We should be worried about children's television viewing, not only because of the immediate effects on their behaviour that are obvious to us, but because of the long-term consequences such as developing into more violent adults. There is also evidence to support the theory that video games have similar effects and more research is needed in this area to reveal how serious these effects are. It is possible to reduce the effects of violent media, but perhaps the best way of dealing with the situation would be to reduce the amount of violence and aggression in the media so children would have less exposure to it. This would involve producing children's programmes with a more positive attitude to prosocial behaviour where heroic characters are rewarded for not acting aggressively and dealing with problems in alternative ways. However, it has to be questioned whether this proposal is realistic considering how much aggression is featured in film and television entertainment in modern society. 