It seems like the debate on video game and TV violence and its effects has reached proportions we've only seen in the climate-change communities lately. Another distinguished professor, L. Rowell Huesmann, the Amos N. Tversky Collegiate Professor of Communication Studies and Psychology, has published a study, conducted at the University of Michigan, confirming the violence to violence link in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Contrary to findings recently published by Christopher John Ferguson of the Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice at Texas A&M International University, Huesmann's study suggest that on-screen violence does have a strong correlation to violent behavior in adolescents and in adults. The study reviewed more than fifty years of research on the effects of media violence.

"The research clearly shows that exposure to virtual violence increases the risk that both children and adults will behave aggressively," said Huesmann.

"Children are also spending an increasingly large amount of time playing video games, most of which contain violence. Video game units are now present in 83 percent of homes with children," Huesmann added.

Huesmann's article states that children in the United States typically spend three to four hours a day watching television. Better than sixty percent of these television programs contain violence, and around forty percent of those, heavy violence.

Huesmann goes on to say that there is only one more aggressive risk to public health than exposure to media violence: cigarette smoking on lung cancer.

"As with many other public health threats," Huessman says, "not every child who is exposed to this threat will acquire the affliction of violent behavior. But that does not diminish the need to address the threat—as a society and as parents by trying to control children's exposure to violent media to the extent that we can."