Why Screen Violence Affects Gifted Children More, Study Investigates

Nowadays, more and more children are exposed to violence through media coverage. Interestingly, research found that gifted children react to screen violence much worse than others.

The Conversation reports a new study published in Gifted Child Quarterly that focused on effects of screen violence exposure to gifted children. Note that researchers referred to gifted children as those with high intelligence as quantified by a standardized test score.

Basically, the good qualities of gifted children are highly motivated, remarkably retentive, morally reasonable, socially adept, humorous, academically recognized, and creative. On the negative end, gifted children can also be future delinquents and they have greater emotional sensitivity.

The study's research team observed 74 gifted children who scored 130 or higher in the intelligence scale and 70 children from Turkey who had relatively lower intelligence scores. All the children were 10 years old during the study (via The Conversation).

The two groups of children took a verbal test before and after watching a video that showed screen violence. In the pre-test, they were asked to generate words starting with A, L, M, S, C, E, B and H; in the post-test, they had to generate words starting with I, D, N, O, F, K, T. Both the tests lasted for one minute.

The Conversation details further that the prepared videos for the children were episodes of the violent series, "Bakugan Battle Brawlers" and a non-violent series, "Arthur" which tackled about family. The episodes were randomly assigned to each group of children.

The researchers found out that the gifted group generated more words before watching violent videos compared to the less gifted group. The tables turned after watching the violent videos: the former came up with slightly fewer words than the latter. In the case of the non-violent videos, the performance of the gifted children before and after watching did not change and they were able to list more words than the less gifted group.

The researchers have yet to conclude the reason for their findings. Nonetheless, they think that the greater sensitivity of the gifted group makes them more anxious during and after watching violent videos. Furthermore, they found out that gifted children liked watching non-violent shows than violent ones.

Parent Herald reported the American Academy of Pediatrics' reminder to parents that they have to monitor and limit their kid's exposure to screen violence. As much as possible, parents should impose restrictions on what sites and shows can their children see.

As per Center for Media Literacy, the best way for parents to help children deal with screen violence is to watch it with them. In that way, the parents could talk to the child after watching and could start discussing the depictions of violence and its consequences. It's important to teach the child the difference between reality from fantasy.

Watch the video below and listen to an empowering short talk about gifted children. Share us your thoughts on the Comments section below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.