How do violent images affect our brain? This has been the object of study by a team of researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a program of the United States National Institutes of Health. The conclusions have been published in the magazine Plos One .
For their experiment, the scientists had 54 volunteers who were divided into two groups : the first, with those who exhibited aggressive behavioral traits and, the second, with individuals who did not exhibit violent tendencies.
After the preliminary questionnaire, they proceeded to perform brain scans on the two groups while viewing violent images, discovering that brain activity was different in the participants, depending on the different levels of aggression . When the group with aggressive attitudes viewed action images, their brain activity was unusually high in a network of regions that activate without doing anything in particular and very low in the orbitofrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with self-control and emotions.
On the contrary, the non-aggressive subjects presented an increase in blood pressure as the days of the experiment passed and the images grew in violence. Thus, the reaction of each person depends on their brain circuits and how aggressive that image is initially .
“Our goal was to analyze what happens in people’s brains when they watch violent movies. Our hypothesis is that if people have aggressive initial traits, they will process violent information in a very different way compared to non-aggressive people , a theory supported by these results ”, says Nelly Alia-Klein, leader of the study.
“Aggression is a trait that develops in conjunction with the nervous system over time from childhood. Behavior patterns solidify and the nervous system prepares to follow behavior patterns in adulthood as they increasingly become personality trainers, ”Alia-Klein emphasizes, which could explain the causes of the differences between aggressive people and those who are not .
