Talk of homicide is on the rise in films, researchers have found, in a trend they say could pose a health concern for adults and children.
A study found that over the past 50 years there had been a small but significant increase in movie characters talking about murdering or killing.
“The surprising thing is the increase occurs not just for crime genres, which you would expect because they’re violent, but also for non-crime genres,” said Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at Ohio State University, who co-authored the study.
The team suggested the rise may indicate an increase in violent behaviour in movies, and called for a promotion of “mindful consumption and media literacy” to protect vulnerable groups, especially children.
Bushman said: “Adults can make their own choices, but I’m especially concerned about children being exposed to violence in the media.”
The question of whether on-screen violence has an impact on viewers has been a topic of much debate. Some studies back the idea young people can become more aggressive after watching violent media, such as TV and video games, with children exposed to such media being more antisocial and emotionally distressed.
However, an analysis published in 2020 suggested any positive relationship between violent behaviour and violent video games is minuscule, while scientists have also suggested that whether violent movies contribute to real-life aggression depends on if the viewer is already predisposed to violence.
Writing in the journal Jama Pediatrics, Bushman and his colleagues reported how they analysed dialogue from 166,534 English-language movies produced from 1970 to 2020 using data held by the website OpenSubtitles.org.
The results revealed almost 7% of the films analysed had dialogue that included verbs with “kill” or “murder” as their root. The team excluded instances where these verbs were used in a question, negation or in a passive form, and they did not include other violence-related verbs, such as “shoot” or “stab”.
“It is a very conservative estimate of murderous verbs during the past half century,” Bushman said.
The team then calculated the percentage of verbs within the dialogue of each movie that contained the roots “kill” and “murder”, and took the average for each year.
The team found that while the percentage of such murderous verbs within movies fluctuated over time, their use generally increased over the decades – a trend that held for both male and female characters. While across all genres and characters 0.21% of verbs within dialogue used “kill” or “murder” as their root in the early 1970s, this rose to 0.37% in 2020.
When the type of film was considered, the researchers found the use of murderous verbs increased over time for both crime and non-crime movies. However, while male characters showed an increase in the use of murderous verbs in both categories, for females this was only the case in non-crime movies.
The team said their results were consistent with previous work which found acts of gun violence in top movies had more than doubled since 1950.
Bushman said the trend highlighted in the study was troubling, adding that exposure to violent media could have a cumulative effect and shape people’s view of the world.
“We know there are many harmful effects of exposure to violent media. It increases aggressive behaviour, but also makes people desensitised, numb, to the pain and suffering of others,” he said.
However Peter Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University in the UK, urged caution.
“It’s a huge logical jump to go from counting the number of ‘murderous’ words in a movie, especially when that count is free of any context as to why the word is being used, to vague talk about health concerns,” he said. “This isn’t something I would really be worrying about.”
