Violence in American and Japanese cartoons: their impact on child aggression

Abstract

This study aimed to compare two types of animation with violent content and its possible effect on child aggression. For this, a quasi-experimental design with pre-test-post-test was used and a particular Primary School with two experimental groups and one control was worked on. A pre-test was applied to all the participants, then the experimental groups were shown animated cartoons with violent content; one of them American and another Japanese. Instead, a comic program was presented to the control group. The projection lasted 66 minutes; once this was completed, a post-test was applied to the three groups. The result was statistically significant for this sample and indicates that the North American and Japanese cartoons did have an effect on the level of general aggressiveness in the children of the experimental groups, with the A type aggression being the most frequently presented