Joanne Cantor

The development of a child into a consumer.

This paper presents a descriptive model of the development of childrens consumer behavior from infancy to 12 years of age. Although there is no single definition of consumer behavior in the literature, those that have been employed seem to entail at least four characteristics. A consumer is able to (1) feel wants and preferences, (2) search to fulfill them, (3) make a choice and a purchase, and (4) evaluate the product and its alternatives. The authors argue that the development of consumer behavior occurs in four phases, and that in each phase, one of the four characteristics of consumer behavior emerges. By drawing together a number of theories and ideas currently in the literature, the authors discuss each of the phases of consumer behavior and explain why particular characteristics of consumer behavior emerge at particular ages.

Affective Responses to the Emotions of a Protagonist.

This study in vestigated the merits of various theoretical rationales for predicting viewers affective responses to the expressed emotions of a protagonist. A film depicting a child undergoning an emotion-inducing experience was produced in six versions and shown to elementary school children. The versions effectd a factorial variation in (a) the type of behavior exhibited by the protagonist in the initial sequences (malevolent, neutral, benevolent) and (b) the emotion expressed by the protagonist in the final sequence (euphoria, dysphoria). When the protagonist behaved benevolently or neutrally, the affective responses of viewers were concordant with those of the protagonist, but when he behaved malevolently, viewers affective responses were discordant with his. The latter finding was seen to be in conflict with predictions based strictly on empathy. The rationale that was considered to account best for the findings was based on the assumption that the observers affective disposition mediates the tendency to respond concordantly or discordantly to anothers emotions.

Elderly Viewers' Responses to Televised Portrayals of Old Age Empathy and Mood Management Versus Social Comparison

This study examined the effects of differently valenced portrayals of old age on the emotional responses of elderly viewers. Lonely and nonlonely elderly people (as determined in a pretest) were given a series of descriptions of television offerings and indicated the degree to which they desired to see each program. In a separate session, they were randomly assigned to view a negative portrayal (involving an unhappy, isolated old man) or a positive portrayal (involving a happy, socially integrated old man). The results indicated that lonely subjects showed greater interest in viewing negative than positive portrayals, whereas nonlonely subjects exhibited the opposite preference. In addition, lonely subjects felt better after viewing the negative portrayal than after the positive portrayal, whereas nonlonely subjects felt better after the positive than after the negative portrayal. The findings therefore indicated that elderly viewers may benefit from varied portrayals of old age more than from uniformly positive or negative depictions.

Effect of timing of information about mitigating circumstances on emotional responses to provocation and retaliatory behavior

Abstract To determine whether the reduction of retaliatory behavior by knowledge of mitigating circumstances is due to less motivation to retaliate or to an inhibition of motivated retaliation, subjects were provoked by a rude experimenter and informed of mitigating conditions (a) before provocation, (b) after provocation, or (c) not at all. Physiological data revealed that prior knowledge of mitigation prevented pronounced excitatory responses to prococation. In contrast, when mitigating conditions were not known, excitatory responses to provocation were intense. In addition, when mitigating information was supplied after provocation, excitatory responses decayed more rapidly than when no such information was supplied. Retaliatory behavior, as measured in complaints about the rude experimenter, was substantially lower in the condition in which mitigation preceded provocation than in the other two conditions. The retaliatory behavior of subjects who were informed of mitigation after being provoked did not differ significantly from that of subjects who were not informed of mitigation. The findings were interpreted as incompatible with the assumption that under mitigating conditions retaliation is motivated but inhibited and as generally supportive of the proposal that mitigation attenuates the response to provocation. In order to explain the failure of the reception of mitigating information after provocation to reduce retaliatory behavior in spite of the observed facilitation of excitatory decay, it was suggested that when subjects were experiencing high levels of anger, they formed a behavioral disposition to retaliate, which outlasted the state of elevated arousal.

Modifying fear responses to mass media in preschool and elementary school children

The emotional responses of 9‐11 year olds to a scary scene from a movie were modified by instructional sets; the responses of 3‐5 year olds were not.

Developmental differences in empathy with a television protagonist's fear

An experiment was conducted to determine whether children at different ages (3-5 vs 9-11) differ in their tendency to share the emotion of a television character. Subjects were shown a videotape of either a frightening stimulus alone or a characters fear in response to a threatening stimulus that was suggested rather than shown directly. Contrasting predictions were made based on a cognitive-developmental view of the process of empathy vs an automatic conception. Both self-reported emotional reactions and physiological responses were consistent with the cognitive-developmental approach: The younger children were less emotionally aroused by the characters fear than by the fear-provoking stimulus, while the older children responded emotionally to both versions of the videotape. The younger childrens lack of empathy was not due to a failure to recognize the nature of the characters emotion. There was some evidence that the older children exhibited a greater tendency to role take than did the younger children.

An agenda for research on youth and the media

Young people today are growing up in a world unlike anything previous generations experienced. Today’s youth have greater access to more forms of communication than ever before. A recent survey found that 8to 18-year-olds spend 6–8 hours/day exposed to some form of media (1). In addition to the traditional television (TV), music, magazines, and movies, new kinds of media such as interactive CDROMs, video games, E-mail, chat rooms, and Web sites provide everything from the latest scientific discoveries to surrogate friendships, virtual sex, and violence. Cataclysmic events sometimes force the public to grapple with issues that researchers have long been exploring. For example, the Littleton, Colorado, school shootings shocked the country into renewed concern about the role that media violence may be playing in the adoption of violent attitudes and behaviors by our youth. In the aftermath, mass communication scholars have pointed to a wealth of information based on more than 40 years of research on the negative effects of media violence. Still, this large body of research on the effects of violence in the media is largely unknown or is misunderstood by the general public, policy makers, and even researchers in other disciplines. Media violence is only one area of influence crucial to explore if we are to understand the role the current media environment may be playing in the development of today’s youth. Other aspects of youth health and well-being, such as sexuality, substance use, materialism, and civic engagement, have also been studied in the context of the mass media and deserve scrutiny and further analysis. At the request of the William T. Grant Foundation, which was embarking on a new initiative to stimulate research on youth, we invited about a dozen key thinkers and researchers to attend a meeting at the Foundation’s headquarters in New York. Ten of the attendees were university professors who have conducted scholarly research on the media over a period of years. Three of the invitees were policy experts or child advocates who use research findings to promote children’s well-being. The researchers were asked to review briefly what is currently known in their area of expertise about how adolescents use and are affected by the media and to make recommendations for future research. The child and youth advocates were asked to suggest the types of research that would be helpful to them in ensuring a healthy media environment for youth in the future. All participants submitted brief abstracts of their positions before the meeting that could be reviewed in advance. The meeting took place on November 16, 1999, to hear and discuss each other’s reports and to develop an agenda for research. Although we each had been working on different aspects of youths’ experience, we had similar concerns and a desire to have our work make a difference in the lives of young people. The research reports provided here are not meant to be exhaustive literature reviews. Instead, they are intended to bring readers up to date on the major issues being addressed in each area, to delineate what the major established findings are, and to point out what we think are the most important gaps in our knowledge.

Enhancing responses to television advertisements via the transfer of residual arousal from prior programming

Viewers rated television commercials seen two and one‐half to four minutes after highly arousing film segments as significantly more effective and enjoyable than the same commercials seen after less arousing programming.

Children's perceptions of the effectiveness of techniques to reduce fear from mass media

Abstract In two separate studies, children reported on their perceptions of the effectiveness of various strategies for reducing fright reactions to mass media stimuli. Three age groups were involved: preschool, 3 to 5 years; early elementary school, 6 to 7 years; and older elementary school, 9 to 11 years. The studies revealed that the perceived effectiveness of cognitive strategies, such as “tell yourself its not real,” increased with age, whereas that of noncognitive strategies, such as “get something to eat or drink,” decreased with age. The differential effectiveness of the two types of strategies had been predicted on the basis of cognitive developmental differences among the groups. Specifically, developmental increases were assumed in the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, in the ability to modify ones own thought processes, and in functional cognitive capacity. Methodological differences between Study 1 and Study 2 demonstrated that younger childrens “yea-saying” tendencies can be circumvented by employing forced choices between pairs of alternative strategies. Both studies also revealed that scary television shows and movies are quite popular among children and that fright reactions to such offerings are prevalent.

Fright Reactions to Television: A Child Survey

Using telephone interviews with a random sample of Dutch children between the ages of 7 and 12 years, the authors investigated (a) the prevalence of television-induced fright, (b) whether the fear-inducing capacity of different types of television content (interpersonal violence, fantasy characters, war and suffering, and fires and accidents) is associated with the childs age and gender, and (c) how boys and girls in different age groups cope with their television-induced fears. Thirty-one percent of the children reported having been frightened by television during the preceding year. Both childrens television-induced fears and their coping strategies to reduce such fears varied by age and gender.