Let me begin with a short scenario that I feel will resonate with many in this audience. Imagine arriving at home after a long day of work and school classes. You grab some dinner, and then sit down with your study materials ready to prepare for the next day, or your future academic projects. As you begin to study you decide to turn on the television, simply to play in the background. Either that or you decide to watch a quick episode of “Dexter†or “Breaking Bad†before or after you hit the books. In this episode we have the opportunity to hear from Dr. Brad J. Bushman who discusses a research article that demonstrates that this may not be the best idea, or at least not the best way to maximize your time to productively learn.

Dr. Brad J. Bushman is a social psychologist, and a professor of Communication and Psychology at the Ohio State University. He is also the Margaret Hall and Robert Randal Rinehart Chair of Mass Communication. For about 30 years he has been studying “the causes, consequences, and solutions to the problem of human aggression and violence.†He is a prominent and influential researcher and I am honored to have had the opportunity to speak with him about his article “Violent and sexual media impair second-language memory during encoding and retrieval.â€Â  Please feel free to share any comments or questions in the section below, or by emailing me at Methodologyforpsychology@gmail.com. Below I share the abstract to his article.

Abstract

“Research suggests that exposure to media containing violence and sex impairs attention and memory. Learning a foreign language is one domain inwhich attention and memory are critical. Two experiments addressed whether exposure to media containing violence and sex interferes with foreign-language performance. Turkish participants (NExperiment 1 = 70, NExperiment 2 = 76) completed a foreign-language performance task before and after viewing a video. By random assignment, participants watched either a video containing violence and sex or a video containing no violence or sex. In both experiments, the two groups did not differ on pretest performance, but participants exposed to violence and sex performed worse on the posttest (Experiment 1: English; Experiment 2: Spanish), and on a delayed test one week later (Experiment 2). These results suggest that participants exposed to violence and sex allocated attentional resources to violent and sexual cues in their videos rather than to the foreign language material.â€

Other Mentioned Resources

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• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
  

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