Parental Mediation of Television Advertising Effects

A comprehensive review of research finds evidence scattered and incomplete but suficient for some conclusions and suggestive of directions for further study.     

Children's Literate Television Viewing: Surprises and Possible Explanations

The limits of mental channel capacity and the depth of information processing may partially explain the discrepancy between what is watched and what is remembered.     

Color Television and Viewing Conditions

This paper outlines the advantages and necessity of controlling viewing conditions for the critical review of color film and picture on color TV monitors. Practices and standards of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for the review of color film by direct projection are given. These are different in several significant respects from formerly used practices and are designed to give subjective response similar to that gotten when the film is viewed on a TV monitor. Viewing conditions for TV monitor pictures are also specified.     

Young Females' Images of Motherhood in Relation to Television Viewing

This study explored the relationship between television viewing and young females' images of motherhood. The respondents were 166 Dutch adolescents (age 15–17) and young women (age 20–22) with various educational backgrounds. None were mothers. We examined the young females' self-image and ideal image of motherhood and explored the extent to which television viewing and viewing motives were related to these images. It was not the total amount of television exposure, but the exposure to certain sitcoms and soaps that appeared to be related to girls' and young women's images of their future motherhood. Sitcoms and soaps that portrayed mothers with a more traditional orientation were associated with young females' anticipation of a traditional motherhood image. Motives for television viewing, indicating a ritualized viewing style, were also related to a traditional view of motherhood.     

Children's Fright Reactions to Television News

In a random survey of parents of kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade children, 37% of the children were reported to have been frightened or upset by a news story on television. The percentage of children being frightened by news increased from kindergarten to the elementary school years, whereas the tendency to be frightened by fantastic, unreal content showed a decreasing trend. The top categories of stories producing fear were violence between strangers, foreign wars and famines, and natural disasters. me tendency to respond with fright to violence between strangers increased with age, and the tendency to be upset by natural disasters decreased with age. Proposed explanations for the observed age differences were based on developmental differences in children's understanding of the fantasy-reality distinction and in their responsiveness to perceptually salient stimuli.     

Does Television Viewing Cultivate Unrealistic Expectations About Marriage?

One explanation for the high divorce rate in our society focuses on the idealistic expectations with which many people enter into marriage. The media have been cited as the source of or major contributor to these expectations; however, no empirical evidence exists to support that claim. Based on a survey of 285 never-married university students, this study sought to examine the relationship between television viewing, holding idealistic expectations about marriage, and intentions to marry. Results from regression and path analyses indicate that, although overall television viewing has a negative association with idealistic marriage expectations, viewing of romantic genre programming (e.g., romantic comedies, soap operas) was positively associated with idealistic expectations about marriage. Further, a strong and positive association between these expectations and marital intentions was evidenced. These findings are discussed in terms of both cultivation theory and the uses and gratifications perspective of media influence.     

Children's Understanding of the Nature of Television Characters

Not until second grade were a majority of children able to differentiate human from animated and puppet characters.     

Violence in Children's Television Programming: Assessing the Risks

This study investigates the nature and extent of violence contained in television programming that targets children aged 12 and younger. The measures employed in this content analysis are grounded in previous experimental research that bas identified contextual features that either diminish or enhance the risk of harmful effects associated with viewing violent portrayals. This report uses the database from the National Television Violence Study (Wilson et al., 1998), which involved an unusually large and representative sample of programming. Results indicate that programs targeted to children contain more violence than do other types of programming, the violence itself is just as likely to be glamorized in children's as in nonchildren's shows, but it is even more sanitized and more likely to be trivialized. These patterns heighten the risk of viewers learning aggression and becoming desensitized from such portrayals. Finally, this study documents 5 subgenres of children's programming that differ dramatically in violent content.