Language and Personality

        “Kill’em, shoot’em, take all of ‘em down!”… These words and the fervent emotion that comes with them may sound brutal and “out of this world”, but unfortunately it has well become the language of a great many young males in the global society today. With the increasing popularity of violent video games in the market, kids nowadays often get exposed more to violent and dirty language and less to polite language. The case of the MRT Genocide on the 21^st of May in Taipei corresponds well to this issue, and from Cheng Chieh’s murder motives, we can see how linguistics and psychology can play a major role in an individual’s personality and way of life.

        For at least a dozen years, linguists that have a foundation in Neuroscience have been researching quite a lot on this topic. It seems that not only the images but also the language and the lexicon frequently heard in a person’s childhood can contribute either negatively or positively to that child’s further mental development. Researches have shown that kids who watch mostly “soft programs” (programs with only friendly words like “That’s very kind of you” and “It’s lovely to have people like you in this world”) or programs with no violence nor villlains usually adopt a friendlier character, whereas kids who spend time playing video games or watching hero-villain shows (shows which have lines like “Fight to death for justice!” or  “May blood be spilled till justice is served!”) tend to be more ferocious as they grow up.

        Hence, the language that kids are exposed to determines to a great extent what kind of person they will turn out to be. If the society wants to avoid violence, one serious and useful way to put that in action is to omit all violent programs and video games in the kid’s market.