Priming effects of media violence on the accessibility of aggressive constructs in memory

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that violent media make aggressive constructs more accessible to viewers. In Experiment I, participants made free associations to homonyms, with one meaning more aggressive than the other, and to nonaggressive words after viewing a violent or nonviolent video. Participants who saw the violent video listed more aggressive associations to both types of words. In Experiment 2, participants completed a lexical-decision task after viewing a violent or nonviolent video. Participants pressed one key if a string of letters was an English word, or another key if it was a nonword. Half of the words were aggressive and half were nonaggressive. Participants who saw the violent video had faster reaction times to aggressive words. Videotape content did not influence reaction times to nonaggressive words. These results suggest that violent media prime cognitive-associative networks related to aggression.