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The Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) movie rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17) was developed in 1968 (PG-13 was added in 1984). Whether the system effectively screens violent and sexual content has not been systematically evaluated. Investigators at the University of Pennsylvania coded the explicitness of violent and sexual content of 855 top-grossing movies released from 1950 to 2006 and analyzed trends in rating assignments.
Since the initiation of the MPAA rating system, explicitness of violent and sexual content increased, and explicitness of both types of content correlated significantly with movie ratings overall. However, significant differences in explicitness of violence between consecutive rating categories wer…