ow motion. This detailed destruction of humans serves to eclipse the meaning of death and lessen its impact upon the viewer. Conversely, this media image of death may also serve to inspire imitative behavior among impressionable children and adolescents, with suicidal death being somehow "greater than life" and awe inspiring (Fulton and Owen, 1988).
Three studies, from 1982, 1985 and 1988 compare adolescents and children in psychological research and posit that suicidal adolescents and children have experienced far more stress than their non-suicidal counterparts. Several character traits have been identified to support the idea that imitative media behavior and television violence do significantly impact on adolescents' and children's suicide. Building on earlier research to establish a baseline for national violence levels, Bollen and Phillips (1982) show that suicides increase in relation to media exposure. Coefficiently, the data further indicate that there is an increased amount of violence several days after media stimulation, mostly in imitative types of suicide and suicide attempts. Although the data are not conclusive, the findings do point to the media and resultant imitative behavior as a trigger mechanism at peak times with individuals somewhat prone to suggestion. Adolescents and children fall into this category since they are often considerably more impressionable than many adults. In fact, adolescents and children often view the media as more of an extension of their own reality, and are similarly unaware of the extreme consequences that imitative behavior may have. In addition, studies have shown that besides suicide, children and adolescents may manifest a considerably higher degree of aggressive behavior after watching certain types of television programs than those in control groups. Television viewing has been linked not only to self-destructive violence, but aggression expressed to parents, other famil...