Which of the following are contextual variables of mediated violence, listed…

Concept. Research on media violence separates two different kinds of factor. Audience factors are what a viewer brings to the screen — social values, personal beliefs, age, temperament. Context variables, in W. James Potter’s sense, belong to the portrayal itself: they describe how a violent act is presented in the message and how the viewer is positioned towards the figures in it, and they are what decide whether the same act of violence teaches, disinhibits, desensitises or leaves the audience unmoved.

Potter’s context set. Potter’s own catalogue of context variables is conventionally enumerated as seven: the reward or punishment attached to the violent act, its depicted consequences, the motive or justification the story supplies, the realism of the portrayal, humour, identification with the media characters (typically through an attractive or heroic perpetrator), and the arousal the scene produces.

Applying it to the five items.

• A. Materialism — a value orientation examined in media content analysis, describing a theme carried by media output as a whole rather than the way a single violent act is staged; it is an ideological content theme, not a portrayal context variable.

• B. Religious temperament — an enduring belief disposition a viewer brings to viewing; it belongs to the audience side of the model, so it sits outside the set of variables that describe the depiction.

• C. Reward — what the story grants or withholds after a violent act; violence that is rewarded, or simply left unpunished, raises the risk of imitation, which is exactly why it is catalogued as a context variable.

• D. Identification with media characters — how closely a viewer relates to a depicted figure; an attractive or identified-with perpetrator makes the modelled behaviour far more likely to be copied, so the viewer’s relation to the portrayed characters is part of the context set.

• E. Motive — the reason the narrative supplies for the violent act; violence framed as justified is learned more readily than violence framed as gratuitous, which is why the motive attached to the act is a context variable.

Cross-check. Run the test the other way: ask of each item whether you could read it off the screen from the violent scene alone. Reward, identification with media characters and motive are all readable from the portrayal; materialism is a theme of the wider content and religious temperament exists only in the viewer, so neither can be a property of the depicted act. Any set that carries materialism or religious temperament therefore mixes an ideological theme or an audience trait into a list that is defined by the depiction.

Answer: C, D, E — Reward, Identification with media characters and Motive.