ABSTRACT
A brief presentation such as this is not an occasion for a review of the literature on the effects of observing televised violence, and I do not attempt one. Instead, I organize my discussion around two questions. The first is the more easily answered: Is watching violence presented on television associated with increased aggression in the viewer? The best answer that we can give on the basis of more than 30 years of research is that it is. The second question, one of greater interest to psychologists, is: When observation of violence is followed by aggression, what intervening processes connect the two? I take up the question of evidence for the connection first, after which I discuss some recent research on intervening variables.
