How Many Heads can a Head-Banger Bang? Too Many.

Does listening to violent song lyrics act as a positive, therapeutic release for pent-up anger, or does it actually breed aggressive feelings? A new study provides evidence for the latter: violent lyrics appear to increase aggression-related thoughts and emotions.

In the most recent issues of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), scientists reported the results of new experiments involving college students. Subjects were given both violent and non-violent songs to listen to, and then asked to perform various psychological tasks that are known to measure aggressive thoughts and feelings. (The songs were performed by the same artists in the same musical styles, so as to isolate the specific impact of lyrics.)

The results: violent lyrics led to more aggressive interpretations of ambiguously aggressive words and increased the speed with which people interpret aggressive words. In other words, people became biased toward seeing aggression around them. These results held even for "humorous" violent lyrics.

Researcher Craig Anderson noted that "such aggression-biased interpretations can, in turn, instigate a more aggressive response, verbal or physical, than would have been emitted in a nonbiased state, thus provoking an aggressive escalatory spiral of antisocial exchanges."

"One major conclusion from this and other research on violent entertainment media is that content matters," continued Dr. Anderson. "This message is important for all consumers, but especially for parents of children and adolescents."

Read the APA press release or the full text of the article

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