Personality and perceptions of harmful and harmless TV violence

A study was carried out to examine viewers' perceptions of violent TV portrayals characterized by different degrees of observable harm to victims and by different programme settings. These perceptions were also related to viewers' personality scores on the EPQ. A panel of 40 individuals rated 18 brief TV scenes depicting violence in American crime-detective or science-fiction settings which resulted in fatal or non-fatal injury, or no observable harm to victims. Results showed that harmful violence was rated as significantly more serious than harmless violence in American crime-detective settings, but that the perceived consequences of violence were less salient discriminating attributes of content in science-fiction settings. There were also individual differences in ratings in that older people and lower P scores tended to perceive harmful violence as more violent, frightening and likely to disturb others than were younger people with higher P scores.