Aletha Huston-Stein

Children's recall of television material: Effects of presentation mode and adult labeling.

Children from preschool, kindergarten, and Grades 3 and 4 viewed an edited prosocial cartoon in one of four viewing conditions that changed program features and introduced viewing information to aid subjects in recognizing and structuring central plot information. Childrens recall of central and incidental program content was assessed. Older children recalled more total information; participants who had viewed with an adult experimenter recalled more material than did children in other viewing conditions. Visual presentation enhanced central recall.

The Effects of TV Action and Violence on Children's Social Behavior

Abstract The independent contributions of action and violence in television programs to childrens attention and social behavior were investigated in 66 preschool boys and girls. Same-sex pairs of these children were assigned to one of four television conditions: (a) High action-high violence, (b) High action-low violence, (c) Low action-low violence, or (d) No TV. Action was defined as rapid movement by characters and objects; violence was physical aggression by characters. Visual attention was greater in high action than in low action programs; there were no differences in attention as a function of violence when action was controlled. Children were observed in free play sessions before and after viewing. Those who saw Low action-low violence TV or who saw No TV increased in imaginative, fantasy play; those who saw High action-high violence decreased in imaginative play; the High action-low violence group fell in between. There was some tendency for aggressive behavior to follow the opposite pattern—hig...

Nutritional misinformation of children: A developmental and experimental analysis of the effects of televised food commercials☆

This study assessed the accuracy of judgments of 100 school age children as to the presence of real fruit content in 3 sets of cereals and beverages advertised on TV: real fruit, nonfruit, and artificially fruit flavored products. In the baseline session, accuracy was an increasing function of age, but children at each age were deceived about real fruit content of artificial fruit products. In session 2, the experimental group saw TV ads for 6 products embedded in a program (naturalistic viewing). They then judged fruit content for these six advertised products, plus a matched set of six for which ads were not shown. Controls saw toy ads on TV, and then judged the same 12 products. In session 3, subjects in each group saw the same ads they had seen in Session 2, without the program and with instruction to attend very carefully to messages in the ad (intensive viewing). They then judged all 12 products again. After naturalistic viewing, few significant differential changes from baseline were found. But after intensive viewing, accuracy of judgment of advertised artificial fruit products was lower than baseline among experimental group children. By contrast, accuracy was higher than baseline both for control childrens judgements of “advertised” prod-

Relation of Conceptual Tempo to Social Behaviors of Head Start Children.

The relation of reflection-impulsivity and motor inhibition to naturally occurring social and self-regulatory behavior of 121 urban Head Start boys and girls was examined. Correlations between the Kansas Reflection-Impulsivity Scale for Preschoolers, motor inhibition tasks, and classroom behavior were computed for two groups of Head Start classes that differed in race and the amount of adult-imposed classroom structure. In the less structured classes, impulsive children were less aggressive, less assertive, and less likely to show understanding of others or to engage in such prosocial behavior as cooperation, helping, and sharing than were their reflective peers. Impulsive children were higher than reflectives on two indices of self-regulation: responsibility during clean-up time and waiting patiently during delays. Impulsivity was not related to behavior in highly structured classes. Motor inhibition was not consistently related to the observational measures.

Televised Aggression and Prosocial Behavior

The advent of television is one of the most significant changes in people’s lives in the 20th century. Television spread so quickly after its introduction in the post-World War II period that the majority of American homes had television sets by the mid-1950s. By the end of the 1960s, a higher percentage of American homes had television sets than refrigerators or indoor plumbing. At the present time, close to half of American homes have two or more televisions.