Schemas/Scripts, Aggressive

Despite plentiful evidence of a link between exposure to media violence and aggression, it is unclear what theoretical mechanism accounts most elegantly for the data. Although both physiologically based theories (e.g., excitation transfer) and predominantly cognitive theories have been supported, both offer a better explanation [Page 735]for short-term increases in aggression than for the longterm effects that have been found. A cleaner and perhaps more intuitive explanation comes from the sociocognitive literature. Specifically, schemas, scripts, and mental models are frequently cited as a causal explanation for the link between exposure to media violence and increases in long-term aggression.

Overall, schema theory states that knowledge is organized around particular concepts. A schema contains the features or attributes that are associated with a category. For example, person schemas include information about people or categories of people that includes their skills, competencies, or values and perhaps exemplar members. Event schemas are processes, practices, or ways in which we typically approach tasks and problems. Role schemas contain sets of expectations, that is, how we expect an individual occupying a certain role to behave.

In the literature on mass media, emphasis is often placed on scripts, a specific type of schema that refers to our knowledge of how a sequence of events proceeds, or perhaps should proceed, including the behaviors and actions involved. One oft-cited example is the restaurant schema. A script for an event, for example, a conflict with a peer, can be acquired quite quickly. For example, preschoolers develop scripts surrounding social interaction even for behaviors that 3-year-olds don't engage in (e.g., alcohol use). In addition, young children can develop these scripts after only one exposure to information about the event. Last, children as young as 5 years of age tend to draw on their own existing mental scripts (e.g., a trip to McDonald's) in encoding and later recalling a story about a trip to McDonald's.

How is this related to media exposure and aggression? Children are thought to develop scripts quickly, especially when little competing information is available. In addition, repeat exposure to a depicted script may act as a reinforcement, making the script more robust, more easily accessible, and more readily activated. That is, if a child encounters a situation, say a conflict, for which he or she has a script available, the child may draw on that information to know what to do. The behaviors chosen and ultimately enacted may come from that script, and that script may have been established through exposure to conflicts in the mass media.

Mental models, another framework used to understand long-term increases in aggression after exposure to media violence, are perhaps the broadest term used to describe the conceptual architecture of the mind. Mental models are cognitive representations of events and situations, including the characters in those situations, the interrelations among the characters, the causal relationships between people and occurrences, and the sequence and timing of events. Mental models are, therefore, what we abstract from our experiences and store in memory as an example of some thing or some situation. Indeed, the abstraction moves beyond an exemplar and becomes, in our minds, the thing itself. Like scripts and schemas, this cognitive architecture is used to guide incoming information, to reason and problem-solve, and to assist in or direct recall.

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