The current TV show rating system does a poor job of screening for violent and aggressive content in cartoons and other TV shows popular with children, two psychologists warn in a new report.

Dr. Jennifer Linder, of Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon and Dr. Douglas Gentile, of Iowa State University in Ames analyzed the content of 76 TV shows voted popular among 95 fifth grade girls. They compared the content of the programs with their respective industry ratings.

The investigators actually found higher levels of physical aggression in designated children’s programs (rated TV-Y and TV-Y7) than among programs for general audiences (rated TV-G, TV-PG, etc.), they report in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

“Parents assume that higher ratings indicate more aggression, but the TV ratings don’t measure what parents expect that they measure,” said Gentile in a press release. Gentile is also director of research for the Minneapolis-based National Institute on Media and the Family.

TV-Y7 rated programs - those designed for children seven years of age or older, including cartoons such as “Digimon,” “Pokemon,” and “Scooby Doo” - had the highest level of physical violence, with nearly three times as much as the next highest category (TV-14), the investigators found.

Linder and Gentile conclude that the ratings’ “fantasy violence” (FV) label for animated violence is misleading and may actually increase children’s exposure to violent content by reducing parents’ concern about the content of these programs.

“Another problem,” Gentile noted in an Iowa State-issued statement, is that the ratings don’t provide information about other types of non-physical aggression, such as verbal or indirect aggression. “This is a problem because we know from this study and others that these types of televised aggression also affect children.” Verbal or indirect aggression included non-physical behavior meant to harm, such as spreading rumors, social exclusion, and ignoring someone.

Gentile and Linder also found a strong link between watching aggressive behavior on TV and children’s aggressive behavior in the classroom, as rated by their teachers.

“There’s ample evidence that physical aggression on television is associated with increases in aggressive behavior,” Linder said. “But there was little until this study that has shown a link between televised indirect aggression and resulting aggression among American children.”

Linder and Gentile think indirect aggression needs to be addressed in future modifications to program rating systems - and now would be an ideal time to do this in the U.S., given the upcoming conversion to digital broadcast. They also think the time has come for a single rating system across different media (i.e., TV, video games, and movies).

“With digital convergence, different media are all going to be on the same box pretty soon, so the idea that they needed to be rated separately is really not particularly valid - especially when the things that parents care about are the same across all of those media,” Gentile noted.

SOURCE: Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, March/April 2009.