Psychology: A 17-year study tracked 700 young people into their adult lives. Hours of viewing were correlated with acts of aggression.

By ROSIE MESTEL, Times Staff Writer

Adolescents who watch more than one hour of television a day are more likely to commit aggressive and violent acts as adults, according to a 17-year study reported today in the journal Science.

The study, which tracked more than 700 adolescents into adulthood, found that young people watching one to three hours of television daily were almost four times more likely to commit violent and aggressive acts later in life than those who watched less than an hour of TV a day.

Girls as well as boys exhibited increased aggression, according to the study, which was hailed by psychologists and social scientists as more evidence of TV’s harmful effects.

“It’s a very important study and has a great deal of credibility–it very niftily isolates television as a causal factor,” said George Comstock, a researcher on media violence at Syracuse University in New York.

It is also the first study, Comstock said, to clearly link TV viewing among adolescents to later, adult violence.

Families Were Selected Randomly

The study authors, from Columbia University and Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, used data from a wider-ranging survey of the behavior of children in 707 New York state families. The families had been selected randomly–not because their children had any behavior problems.

Over the study’s 17 years, the children and their parents were periodically interviewed about TV habits, violence and aggression. Interviews began in 1983, when the children’s average age was 14; follow-up interviews were conducted at average ages of 16, 22 and 30.

The scientists also examined state and FBI records in 2000 to find out if any of those in the study–who by then had reached an average age of 30–had been arrested or charged with a crime.

The authors found that 5.7% of those who reported watching less than one hour of TV a day as adolescents committed aggressive acts against others in subsequent years–either by their own admission, a parent’s report or legal records. Those acts included threats, assaults, fights, robbery and using a weapon to commit a crime.

That figure rose to 22.5% of those who watched TV for one to three hours a day and to 28.8% of those who watched more than three hours daily.

The size of the effect was surprising, said lead author Jeffrey Johnson, assistant clinical professor of psychology in Columbia University’s psychiatry department.

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– ROSIE MESTEL, Times Staff Writer