Fmri Technology To Identify Changes In Brain When Viewing Violent Programs

Behavior Control Center in Brain Less Responsive After Repeated Exposure to Violence May Lead to Aggressive Behavior

NEW YORK (Dec. 4, 2007) – Violence is a frequent occurrence in television shows and movies, but can watching it make you behave differently?

© 2000, The Patriot, Columbia Pictures.

Although research has shown some correlation between exposure to media violence and real-life violent behavior, there has been little direct neuroscientific support for this theory until now. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that watching violent programs can cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active (shown in Figure 1). In a paper in the Dec. 5 on-line issue of PLoS ONE (published by the Public Library of Science), Columbia scientists show that a brain network responsible for suppressing behaviors like inappropriate or unwarranted aggression (including the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, or right ltOFC, and the amygdala) became less active after study subjects watched several short clips from popular movies depicting acts of violence. These changes could render people less able to control their own aggressive behavior. Indeed the authors found that, even among their own subjects, less activation in this network was characteristic of people reporting an above average tendency to behave aggressively. This characteristic was measured through a personality test.

A secondary finding was that after repeated viewings of violence, an area of the brain associated with planning behaviors became more active (shown in Figure 2). This lends further support to the idea that exposure to violence diminishes the brain’s ability to inhibit behavior-related processing.

None of these changes in brain activity occurred when subjects watched non-violent but equally engaging movies depicting scenes of horror or physical activity.

“These changes in the brain’s behavioral control circuits were specific to the repeated exposure to the violent clips,” said Joy Hirsch, Ph.D., professor of Functional Neuroradiology, Psychology, and Neuroscience and Director of the Center for fMRI at CUMC, and the PLoS ONE paper’s senior author. “Even when the level of action in the control movies was comparable, we just did not observe the same changes in brain response that we did when the subjects viewed the violent clips.” Joy Hirsch, Ph.D.

“Depictions of violent acts have become very common in the popular media,” said Christopher Kelly, the first author on the paper and a current CUMC medical student. “Our findings demonstrate for the first time that watching media depictions of violence does influence processing in parts of the brain that control behaviors like aggression. This is an important finding, and further research should examine very closely how these changes affect real-life behavior.” Christopher Kelly

Jack Grinband, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Neuroscience, fMRI Research Center, also was a leading author of this paper. Jack Grinband, Ph.D.

# # # Columbia University Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, pre-clinical and clinical research, in medical and health sciences education, and in patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, nurses, dentists, and public health professionals at the College of Physicians & Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. For more information about Columbia University Medical Center, visit www.cumc.columbia.edu

EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: The following fMRI brain images showing the areas activated after viewing violent stimuli are available in print quality format by request.

Figure 1:

© 2007, Columbia University Medical Center.

Figure 1 cutline: The yellow area of the brain is the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, or right ltOFC, which has been previously associated with decreased control over a variety of behaviors, including reactive aggression. The first graph illustrates that as the number of violent movies watched increased, the right ltOFC activity diminished. The second graph shows that when subjects watched the non-violent control clips, there were no systematic changes in the activation of this area.

Figure 2:

© 2007, Columbia University Medical Center.

Figure 2 cutline: The yellow area shows the supplementary motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning and imagining behaviors. The first graph illustrates that as the number of violent movies watched increased, the supplementary motor activity increased. The second graph shows that when subjects watched the non-violent control clips, there were no systematic changes in the activation of this area.

Tags

Christopher Kelly, Columbia Pictures, CUMC, Dental Medicine, Functional Neuroradiology, Joy Hirsch