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WATCHING just one hour of television a day can make people more violent. And children aren鈥檛 the only ones affected, say researchers in New York鈥攁dults are as well.

A team led by Jeffrey Johnson at Columbia University in New York looked at surveys of 707 New York State families, chosen at random. Each family had a child between the ages of 1 and 10 when the study began. Individuals were interviewed four times between 1975 and 1993, when the mean age of the younger generation was 22, and television viewing was among the behaviours noted down. In 2000, the families filled out a questionnaire about aggression, and the researchers cross-checked it with FBI and state records.

They found there was a significant link between watching a lot of television and later aggression鈥攅ven if a person had not been violent at the start of the study. This was true even after the team accounted for other risk factors for violent behaviour, such as childhood neglect, growing up in a dangerous neighbourhood, low parental education and psychiatric problems.

Of boys who watched three hours or more of television each day around the age of 14, 45 per cent went on to commit an aggressive act against another person, compared with 9 per cent of those who spent less than an hour in front of the box. Almost a quarter of the three-hours-a-day group went on to commit robbery, threaten to injure someone or use a weapon to commit a crime.

In females, the strongest link showed up in their twenties. Of women who watched three hours or more television around the age of 22, 17 per cent went on to commit an aggressive act, compared with no one in the group watching less than an hour a day.

The study does not reveal how much violence people saw on the screen. Earlier research had hinted that people who watch a lot of violence on television are more aggressive, but failed to establish that violent TV made them more belligerent. It might be simply that those who are prone to aggression like watching it too.

Johnson argues that violence is now so common on television鈥攅specially in children鈥檚 programmes鈥攖hat viewers cannot avoid it. Other research suggests that an hour of prime-time TV in the US contains between three and five violent acts on average, while programming for children contains between 20 and 25. 鈥淪ports, news, commercials鈥攊t鈥檚 everywhere,鈥� says Johnson.

He says the study confirms for adults what was already accepted in children: viewing violence makes people more likely to behave that way. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think it disappears after age 30,鈥� he says.

Craig Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State University in Ames, hopes the study will encourage parents to cut adolescents鈥� exposure to TV violence. 鈥淵ou should know what your kids are watching,鈥� he says. 鈥淭ake the TV out of the kid鈥檚 room and put it in a public place in the house.鈥�