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Narratives, emotions and violence on television: gender attitudes towards human suffering

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Abstract

The content of violent images broadcast on television is more explicit every day. New technologies favour the creation of very realistic and brutal scenes. Sources of information are increasing their use of new technologies that bring news from distant and remote places. The aim of this paper is analysing the narratives about emotions based on the exposure to violent images, particularly the differences and similarities between men and women’s gaze. The methodology of it is discourse analysis, which comes from focus groups that have been exposed to violent images extracted from TV news. The groups were formed based on the age and place of residency, with an equal participation in gender. We could conclude that both genders have more in common than the differences, as the most important and serious facts are perceived in a similar way. However, there are some differences in the attitudes towards the exposure of violence, mostly due to gender socialisation. Through the transference of the gaze that men and women capture, feel and are moved by the suffering of people close to their gender category and social role. Despite everything, we can find focus groups where men and women are reconfiguring their cognitive and emotional universe beyond traditional gender roles.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the IP of the project. The data are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions.

Notes

  1. To know more about empathy and the relationship between media violence, empathy and sympathy, see among others: Wispé, 1986; Maibom 2009; Vossen et al. 2017.

  2. In Western societies, people are traditionally classified in gender/sex binary as men or women. However, this viewed has been challenged by different individual and cultural changes, and in many cases with strong resistance (Korolczuk and Graff 2018; Morgenroth et al. 2021). Despite that fact, gender socialisation generally continuous to be binary for that, this work assumes a binary understanding of gender, but we acknowledge the limitations of this binary model. In addition, we understand the diversity of gender constructions and many of them fall outside the binary, because biology and the social/cultural factors are interrelated and influence each other, thus gender and sex are both socially constructed (Butler 1990).

  3. This is what Carol Gilligan (1982) known as 'the ethics of care', which means the differences in ethical and moral judgment between men and women are due gender socialisation. Both are raised in a sex-gender system; women understanding the world as a network of relationships where we all are dependant to each other, while men’s worldview is more self-interested, hence their individualistic behaviour (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Amorós, 1985; Benhabib 1992).

  4. Madrid represented a big city, and Salamanca a small city, with under than 100,000 inhabitants.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express gratitude to Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain under Grant CSO2011-29439, Project, “Violence on television: longitudinal study and analysis of viewers' moral evaluation, emotions and attitudes". The participating organization was Complutense University of Madrid and the duration was from: 01/01/2012 to 12/31/2014.

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  1. Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology, Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, Complutense University of Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, 28223, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, Spain

    Marta Romero-Delgado & María Concepción Fernández-Villanueva

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  1. Marta Romero-Delgado
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  2. María Concepción Fernández-Villanueva
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Contributions

The manuscript was written through contributions of all authors. MCFV was the IP of the project. She participated in the design, conducting the interviews and analysis. MR-D conducting the interviews and focus groups, the project discussion and the analysis of results. All authors have given approval to the final version of the manuscript. The authors confirm this work is original and has not been published elsewhere, nor is it currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.

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Correspondence to Marta Romero-Delgado.

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Romero-Delgado, M., Fernández-Villanueva, M.C. Narratives, emotions and violence on television: gender attitudes towards human suffering. SN Soc Sci 4, 15 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00804-6

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