Consider an experiment in which participants watch various types of tv programming and are then observed while playing a physical game to determine the number of aggressive acts they emit. in this example, the dependent variable would be the

I believe the answer is:  type of TV programs watched.

Independent variable refers to the variables which would cannot be influenced by the existence of other variables, but might influence other variables.
In the experiment above, the type of tv programs that watched could influence the aggressive tendencies but it couldn't happen the other way around.