Additional links not found in Julian's writeup... here's the homepage of Florence Chee, one of the student researchers mentioned in the article, and a pdf of the paper she presented with Richard Smith.

In general, I agree. But you have to admit, there's a little bit of a difference between reading something horrible in a comic book, and playing GTA3 where you get to have sex with a hooker and then beat her to death with a baseball bat.

Yeah, that made me want to rush right out and do the same thing in real life! If you can't tell the difference between a game, comic book, movie, etc and reality you have a much larger problem that you need to go see someone about. Violence has always been a part of our society. 100 years ago it was normal to have a public hanging on Sunday and for all the people to come and make a picnic out of it. What we see doesn't make us do violent things other social problems do...