Violence, Sex, and Dreams - Free Essay with the Article Analysis

The article focuses on the impacts that violence and sexual content in the media have on human night dreams. The authors argued that viewing violence and sexual content can negatively impact one's dreams through the creation of thoughts in the semantic memory. They have noted the fact that technology is prevalent in today's world and people get immersed in social media, use of computers or watching television programs. In this case, they spend a substantial amount of time in front of digital media which might affect their dreams during night hours.

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The authors relied on cognitive neo-association theory to prove that sexual contains and violence prevalent in the media increases people's frequency of dreams. In their study, they used 1287 Turkish participants to analyze the impact of social media content on their daily dreams. They measured the frequency of dreams and their content during the experiment time. They found that majority of individuals who consumed media full of sexual and violent scenes experienced dreams related to those actions (Bulck, Cetin, Terzi & Bushman, 2016).

The results could have been different if the study was conducted using participants from the United States due to several reasons. Firstly, US is among the countries children, and young adults get much exposure to sexual and violence in movies, songs or online games. There is little regulation of media content and no strictness on the sexual media censorship. Secondly, unlike Turkey, United States have little regulation of social material, and the government puts little effort in blocking and banning harmful sites. As a result, sex and violence become common in media and participants consume them on a daily basis. Thus, they may not experience dreams related to those content because of their frequent association. Ideally, human thoughts may be more likely to be triggered when fed with new content but may fail to trigger semantic memory if they consume same content occasionally.

Several other factors may have direct or indirect impacts on the learning, behavior, and conditioning of a person. These include the environment and motivation. A person can improve his or her learning or behavior if given the motivation to achieve that goal. Motivation gives someone strength to perform a task efficiently. The environment, on the other hand, entails someone's surroundings which may shape how one lives in the society. It is imperative to note that one's dreams can influence external behaviors. For instance, people's social interactions may be significantly affected by dreams because thoughts determine whether someone should have aggressive of friendly interaction with others (Huesmann, 2007). Likewise, dreams change people's behavior and judgment depending on the nature of the dreams. Aggressive dreams shape someone to be hostile while more complaisant dreams develop someone to have good judgment.

Violence and social media significantly influence someone's behavior. Studies show that social media shapes our relationships, shopping, and education among other life events. It harbors desirable and undesirable things such as happiness, anger, love or sadness. Violence in the media develops someone to have aggressive behaviors while other sexual scenes like pornography results to risky sexual behaviors. Social media influence human attitudes, emotions, opinions, and thinking in the society. Eventually, one develops specific behavior depending on their social media consumption (Huesmann, 2007). Conclusively, this article has extensively supported information contained in our textbook. It has precisely analyzed the relationship between sex, violence, and dreams and shown how they can impact someone's behavior.

References

Huesmann, L. R. (2007). The impact of electronic media violence: Scientific theory and research. Journal of Adolescent Health, 41(6), 6-13.

Van den Bulck, J., Cetin, Y., Terzi, O., & Bushman, B. J. (2016). Violence, sex, and dreams: Violent and sexual media content infiltrate our dreams at night. Dreaming, 26(4), 271-279.