The language of murder is increasing in movies, researchers have found, in a way they say can cause health concerns for adults and children.
A study found that in the last 50 years there has been a small but significant increase in the number of actors in films about killing or being killed.
“What’s surprising is that the increase is not only for the criminal types, which you would expect because they are violent, but also for the non-criminal types,” said Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at Ohio State University. State, co-author. the study.
The group suggested the rise could reflect an increase in violent behavior in films, and called for “careful use and literacy” to be encouraged to protect vulnerable groups, especially children.
Bushman said: “Adults can make their own decisions, but I am very concerned about children who are exposed to violence in the media.”
Whether violence on screen has an impact on viewers has been a hotly debated topic. Some studies support the idea that teenagers may become more violent after watching violent media, such as TV and video games, and that children exposed to such media are less social. and experiencing depression.
However, a review published in 2020 suggested that any positive relationship between violent behavior and violent video games is small, while scientists also suggested that violent movies induce resort to actual violence depending on whether the viewer is already prone to violence.
Writing in the journal Jama Pediatrics, Bushman and his colleagues reported how they analyzed interviews from 166,534 English-language films produced from 1970 to 2020 using data stored by the website. of OpenSubtitles.org.
The results revealed that about 7% of the films analyzed had dialogues that included verbs with “kill” or “murder” as their root. The group excluded cases in which these verbs were used in a question, negation or indicative form, and they did not include other verbs related to violence, such as “shoot” or “stab”.
“It’s a very conservative estimate of homicides over the last fifty years,” Bushman said.
The team counted the number of verbs in the dialogue of each film with the roots “kill” and “murder”, and took an average for each year.
The team found that while the percentage of such killing verbs in films fluctuated over time, their use increased over the decades – a trend that held for both male and female players. Although all forms and characters 0.21% of conversational verbs used “kill” or “murder” as their root in the early 1970s, this has risen to 0.37% in 2020.
When considering the type of film, the researchers found that the use of fatal verbs increased over time for both crime and non-crime films. However, although male characters showed an increase in the use of murder verbs in both categories, for females this was only in non-criminal films.
The team says their results are consistent with their previous work, which found acts of gun violence in high-profile movies have doubled since 1950.
Bushman said that the trend highlighted in these studies is disturbing, adding that exposure to violent media can have an additional effect and shape people’s view of the world.
“We know that there are many harmful effects of exposure to violent media. “It increases violent behavior, but it also makes people lose their emotions, lose their strength, feel the pain and suffering of others,” he said.
However Peter Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University in the UK, urged caution.
He said: “It’s a huge logical leap from counting the number of ‘killer’ words in a film, especially when that number doesn’t have any meaning as to why the word is used, to talk vaguely about health problems,” he said. “This is not something I would be worried about.”
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