Introduction: Mass media, particularly television, show every day, at almost any hour, facts and exhibitions related to violence. News is sometimes diffused from one to another television agency, from one to another program, often dramatizing situations and persons. The television violence may determinate emulative attitudes, especially in infants and children. The language of young people reflects television and multimedia communication. Often there is no educational model for children. The progressive vanishing of intergenerational relationship makes young and old people more separated and alone. The aged who preserve experience and culture and are sometimes victim of social conflicts complain the images of television violence and blame their influence on children; intergenerational relationship may let children and aged to feel trust, to control the excess of emotions, to develop a critical, autonomous thinking, and to realize personal identity.
Goals: Following previous research, the present one aims to examine the opinions, emotional reactions and attitudes elicited by topics of television violence. It particularly tries to make clearer the relationship and the way of interaction between aged and children during the joined television presentation of sequences of direct and indirect violence that have been at this goal selected.
Methods: We have studied two groups: above 65 years old and 9-15 years old, classified according to sex, age and residence.
Procedure utilized:
1) Audition of 16 television sequences of violence and of 4 sequences concerning present specific topics. We have selected 8 images of direct violence: twins towers, images of war, police attacks, violence by men against animals, violence by animals against animals, violence in cartoons, image of a murder, capital punishment; 8 images of indirect violence: hunger in children, women with burqa, emarginated aged, clochard, the phrase “Entrance Forbidden to Jews and Dogs” from the movie “La Vita è Bella," discrimination towards handicapped, news of criminals acts, and pollution. The former represent violent images of immediate comprehension and direct impact of aggressiveness towards people or animals; the latter situations reflect the consequences of violent attitudes and behaviors. We have selected some present topics of widespread interest: greenhouse effect, cloning, transgenic foods, natural disasters.
2) Questionnaire.
3) Test for the evaluation of violent images.
4) Test I-R about aggressiveness.
5) IPAT anxiety scale
Seminars will be organized to apply the results of the research and to realize educational program for children.
Results: Women have a better emotional control and are more sensitive; boys have less emotional control; there aren’t meaningful differences according to age among old groups, boys groups, and between living in countries and cities areas; old people living at home are more sensitive, especially to direct violence: the relationship stimulates a better emotional control and a better critical elaboration of contents.
Conclusions: the old people, on the base of their experiences, may act as an emotional and cultural model for children, who may help them in understanding and approaching young people.
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