In the study of the effects of TV violence on regular television viewers, the main theme has been the relation between the amount of violence viewed on TV and viewers' aggressiveness. However, Gerbner et al. (1977) asserted that the relation between the amount of TV violence viewed and viewers' perception of the real world was more important. They substantiated the hypothesis that the more people watched TV, the more they confused the 'reality' in the program with that in the real world. They further claimed that heavy viewing mostly affected viewers' perception of safety in society and of trust in other people. This is not merely a follow-up to Gerbner's Study. He tried to find out the relation between the number of viewing hours and viewers' enculturation. However, in this study, the auther emphasized the type of program as well as the number of viewing hours. Thus, the purpose of this study was to clarify the relation between 1) the amount of TV viewing and viewers' perception of safety in the real world and of trust in other people, and 2) the number of crime-depicting programs viewed and viewers' perception of safety in the real world and of trust in other people in the case of Japan. 504 junior high school students were asked 1) to choose TV programs they often saw from the one-week program (from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.) list, 2) to state how many hours a day they watched TV, and 3) to answer five questions about their perception of safety in the real world and three questions about their perception of trust in other people. The results indicated that there was no relation between the amount of TV viewing and viewers' perception of safety in the real world and of trust in other people. However, there was some relation between the number of crime-depicting programs viewed and perception of safety in the real world. This indicates that some types of programs affect viewers' perception of safety while others do not. The fact suggests that in considering the effects of TV viewing, types of program, should be considerd, thougt they were overlooked in the past study.

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