Channel Frederator Blog

When Bishop Animation did the pilot episode of “Kung Fu Jimmy Chow” for Camp Chaos, I was a bit worried that it was too over the top in the violence area. According to a new study, I may have been worried for nothing.

From the article:

Professor Alison Schwartz, a co-author of the paper, published in next month’s edition of Early Childhood Education, said: ‘The current belief is that violence depicted in television programmes, particularly cartoons, has a negative impact on young children’s behaviour. We found that not to be true.’

She went on: ‘Most pre-schoolers recognise cartoon programmes as make-believe and understand these characters inhabit fictional worlds.’

But Schwartz’s conclusions have been criticised by Professor John Murray, who told the US Senate recently that his research showed that real-life aggression among children may be activated by aggressive acts on television.

‘I found that the brain treats entertainment violence as something real and stores this violence as [Read more…]