Television Exposure and Children's Decoding of Nonverbal Behavior1

Two studies considered the way in which the magnitude of exposure to television relates to children's understanding and interpretation of others' nonverbal behavior. In the first study, 6th graders made judgments regarding other children whose nonverbal facial behavior did not match their internal emotional state. Results showed that heavier television viewers held a less differentiated, more simplistic view of the consequences of nonverbal self-presentation strategies. In the second study, children in Grades 2 through 6 made judgments of others' nonverbal expressions of emotion. As predicted, heavier television viewers were better at decoding others' nonverbal expressions than lighter viewers, presumably because of their greater exposure to nonverbal displays of emotion on television. In addition, nonverbal decoding skills improved with age.     

Source confusion as an explanation of cultivation: a test of the mechanisms underlying confusion of fiction with reality on television

Cultivation studies have found evidence that heavy television viewers adopt a world view congruent with how the world is portrayed in fictional television programs. An explanation is that viewers may remember fictional TV stories as realistic stories or news (fiction-to-news confusion). Until now, fiction-to-news confusion was found only if at least a week evolved between watching TV and asking viewers what was remembered. The present study conducted with a purposive sample of students and employees of a college in The Netherlands (N=96; M age = 28.6 yr., SD = 10.9) indicates that fiction-to-news confusions can also occur almost immediately after watching. In addition, whereas earlier research suggests that fiction-to-news confusions are associated with heavy viewing, i.e., more confusion when more hours per day are spent on TV viewing in leisure time, and faulty memory, the present study more specifically suggests that participants make many fiction-to-news confusions when they are exposed to relatively many fictional TV fragments that contain threatening, violent events.     

The Impact of “Scary” TV and Film on Children's Internalizing Emotions: A Meta‐Analysis

Despite a general perception that violent or scary television creates anxiety in children, the research literature is small and disparate. A meta‐analysis quantifies the impact of scary television and film on children's internalizing emotions (fear, anxiety, sadness, and sleep problems). Scary television has a relatively small impact on children's internalizing emotions (r = .18) overall, and this association was not significantly moderated by whether the televised material was factual (e.g., news) or fictional or contained violence. Children under 10 were more susceptible to scary TV. The overall result contrasts with the dramatic effects found for individual children within studies, suggesting that research is needed to unpick the factors that moderate the effect that scary television has on children.     

Parents' expressiveness and young children's emotion decoding with parents and unknown adults

The authors investigated young children's ability to decode the emotions of happiness and anger expressed by their parent and an adult stranger. Parents and adult strangers (encoders) were videotaped while describing events that had elicited happiness or anger. Children viewed brief clips edited from these videotapes and indicated the emotion that their parent or the stranger was expressing. With male encoders, only children's age predicted accuracy. With female encoders, mothers' expressive style and children's age interacted to predict children's decoding accuracy. Compared with older children of less positively expressive mothers, older children of more positively expressive mothers were more accurate overall, because they were better at recognizing happiness. In general, children were no more or less accurate in decoding their parent's emotions than they were in decoding an unknown adult's emotions.     

A parent-administered program to reduce children's television viewing

A parent-administered program to reduce television viewing of primary school-aged children was tested on two boys and three girls from three different families who were heavy viewers of television. Children were given 20 unearned tokens each week by their parents, which they could exchange for up to 10 hours of viewing time. The child earned a gold token for viewing in accordance with the rules for 4 consecutive weeks, which was exchanged for a reward. Parents were given instructions to follow the program independently. Data on hours of television viewing, homework, and reading were recorded each day by one or both parents. A multiple-baseline analysis of the effects of the TV reduction program indicated that children reduced their baseline television viewing by more than half once the program was implemented, and continued to maintain these changes 6 months and 1 year after the program was discontinued. Reading time increased for all children whereas effects on homework varied across children. The results support the effectiveness of a parent-administered program for nonbehavior problem children who watch excessive amounts of television.     

The relationship of television viewing to physical fitness and obesity

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which light, moderate, and heavy television viewing relates to multiple measures of obesity and physical fitness among 379 high school males. The Body Mass Index and Tucker's Perceived Somatotype Scale were employed to assess obesity; physical fitness was measured by six tests: pushups, pullups, sidestep, long jump, situps, and jog-walk. Results showed that light television viewers scored significantly better than heavy viewers on a composite fitness index and on pushups, pullups, sidestep, situps, and jog-walk considered individually. Similarly, light viewers performed better than moderate viewers on the composite fitness measure and on pushups, pullups, and jog-walk. Light viewers displayed a strong tendency toward better fitness than moderate viewers on the long jump, situps, and sidestep tests, although statistical significance was not attained. Light viewers were not significantly less obese than moderate or heavy viewers. Statistical control of the demographic variables, applied simultaneously, had little influence on the associations found in this study. The findings indicate that for purposes of good physical fitness, television viewing should be limited to one hour or less per day.     

Parents' Expressiveness and Young Children's Emotion Decoding With Parents and Unknown Adults

The authors investigated young children's ability to decode the emotions of happiness and anger expressed by their parent and an adult stranger. Parents and adult strangers (encoders) were videotaped while describing events that had elicited happiness or anger. Children viewed brief clips edited from these videotapes and indicated the emotion that their parent or the stranger was expressing. With male encoders, only children's age predicted accuracy. With female encoders, mothers' expressive style and children's age interacted to predict children's decoding accuracy. Compared with older children of less positively expressive mothers, older children of more positively expressive mothers were more accurate overall, because they were better at recognizing happiness. In general, children were no more or less accurate in decoding their parent's emotions than they were in decoding an unknown adult's emotions.     

Nonverbal channel use in communication of emotion: how may depend on why

This study investigated the hypothesis that different emotions are most effectively conveyed through specific, nonverbal channels of communication: body, face, and touch. Experiment 1 assessed the production of emotion displays. Participants generated nonverbal displays of 11 emotions, with and without channel restrictions. For both actual production and stated preferences, participants favored the body for embarrassment, guilt, pride, and shame; the face for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness; and touch for love and sympathy. When restricted to a single channel, participants were most confident about their communication when production was limited to the emotion's preferred channel. Experiment 2 examined the reception or identification of emotion displays. Participants viewed videos of emotions communicated in unrestricted and restricted conditions and identified the communicated emotions. Emotion identification in restricted conditions was most accurate when participants viewed emotions displayed via the emotion's preferred channel. This study provides converging evidence that some emotions are communicated predominantly through different nonverbal channels. Further analysis of these channel-emotion correspondences suggests that the social function of an emotion predicts its primary channel: The body channel promotes social-status emotions, the face channel supports survival emotions, and touch supports intimate emotions.     

Interpreting President Barack Obama's Facial Displays of Emotion: Revisiting the Dartmouth Group

Charismatic presidents like John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and now Barack Obama have been able to overcome stereotype‐based barriers to political power by connecting emotionally with viewers, particularly through their nonverbal skills. In this study we focus on the facial displays of emotion by President Obama and how participants interpret them. This study builds upon the pioneering research of the Dartmouth Group concerning response to displays of happiness‐reassurance by political leaders. It will first replicate and extend upon existing research by using Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to characterize facial displays by President Obama, specifically three neutral displays and three different types of smiles. Second, this study replicates research carried out over two decades ago concerning individual differences in sex, ethnicity, and age cohort on response to political candidates culturally defined as Black. Video focusing on the head and torso were FACS coded and presented in a web‐based experiment to 79 participants working at a southern institution of higher education. The participants identified the emotions felt by President Obama on a scale ranging from “not at all” to “extremely” focusing on the basic emotion terms of: “Happy” and “Playful” (happiness‐reassurance) and “Angry” and “Disgusted” (anger‐threat). Findings suggest participants differentiate between subtle facial‐display differences and that there are differences based upon ethnicity and support for President Obama when they interpret his facial displays of emotion.     

Evaluation of nonverbal emotion in face and voice: some preliminary findings on a new battery of tests

This report describes some preliminary attributes of stimuli developed for future evaluation of nonverbal emotion in neurological populations with acquired communication impairments. Facial and vocal exemplars of six target emotions were elicited from four male and four female encoders and then prejudged by 10 young decoders to establish the category membership of each item at an acceptable consensus level. Representative stimuli were then presented to 16 additional decoders to gather indices of how category membership and encoder gender influenced recognition accuracy of emotional meanings in each nonverbal channel. Initial findings pointed to greater facility in recognizing target emotions from facial than vocal stimuli overall and revealed significant accuracy differences among the six emotions in both the vocal and facial channels. The gender of the encoder portraying emotional expressions was also a significant factor in how well decoders recognized specific emotions (disgust, neutral), but only in the facial condition.     

Sexual Minority Identity,Viewing Motivations,and Viewing Frequency of LGB-Inclusive Television Among LGB Viewers

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between dimensions of sexual minority identity, viewing motivations, and viewing frequency of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB)-inclusive television (TV) among LGB viewers. Two hundred two LGB adults completed measures regarding sexual minority identity, TV viewing motivations, and frequency of viewing LGB-inclusive TV programs. Analyses revealed that dimensions of sexual minority identity (i.e., internalized homonegativity, acceptance concerns, and identity affirmation) were positively associated with a learning motivation for viewing LGB-inclusive TV. Moreover, a learning motivation mediated the relationship between dimensions of sexual minority identity and frequency of viewing LGB-inclusive TV. These findings have important implications for clinicians, and suggest that engaging with LGB-inclusive TV may represent an important coping strategy for LGB individuals dealing with identity concerns.     

Nonverbal emotion displays, communication modality, and the judgment of personality

The goal of this research was to investigate the impact of nonverbal expressive cues on the attribution of the Big Five personality traits. Expressive cues of fear, disgust, happiness, and sadness were elicited in a sample of 22 encoders while watching films, narrating, and posing. Encoders’ personalities were rated by themselves and unacquainted raters who watched the encoders, and blind judges rated the traits of a typical student. Expressive cues influenced the raters’ attribution of personality, but this influence was weakest when the encoders expressed happiness (vs. negative emotions) and when they were narrating an emotional experience (when the cues were least potent). Negative and strong expressive cues interfered with the application of a normative, and more accurate, judgment strategy.     

Television viewing and the learning of sex-role stereotypes

This study was designed to determine the relationship between the amount of time children spend watching television and their knowledge of adult sex-role stereotypes. Males and females in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 who were classified as heavy television viewers (25 or more hours per week) or light viewers (10 or less hours per week) both at the time of the study and 15 months previously were administered the Sex Stereotype Measure, an instrument designed to determine children's awareness of stereotyped sex-role perceptions held by adults. Heavy viewers were found to have more stereotyped perceptions than light viewers. A significant interaction effect indicated that among low viewers the perception of male stereotypes steadily declines with increasing age; among heavy viewers, stereotypic responses to male items are maintained with increasing age. No comparable interaction effect was obtained for perception of female stereotypes. The role of interaction with live models in breaking down stereotypic perceptions of males is discussed.A modified version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, April 1975.     

Neural Network Simulations Support Heuristic Processing Model of Cultivation Effects

Many studies have shown that heavy TV viewers make social reality judgments more in line with televised reality. Shrum's (2001) heuristic model of cultivation effects predicted and found that biases in first-order cultivation judgments resemble heuristic processing. Systematic processing eliminated the effect. This study presents a series of computational simulations to examine whether a simple feed-forward neural network model exhibits learning behavior in accordance with Shrum's model. The data from the model are tested in contrast to data from human participants. Results closely fit human data. Simulations show that increased television exposure increases construct accessibility; television exemplars are not discounted when exhibiting the cultivation effect; and systematic processing reduces or eliminates the cultivation effect.     

Aggression in television programs in Finland

A detailed coding system was constructed to study the frequency and salience of aggression in TV programs broadcast on Finnish television. Salience of aggression was measured by the brutality index which consisted of ratings concerning the (1) program context, (2) seriousness, (3) justification, and (4) dramatization of aggressive acts. When compared to previous studies of TV-violence, the rate of aggression in Finnish TV was moderate with 3.5 aggressive acts per program hour. Only 14% of aggressive acts portrayed brutal aggression, which was mostly seen in fictional films and serials. A clear 9 pm watershed was not seen in Finland, since aggressive acts were distributed quite evenly during the TV time. Aggressiveness of a program was not related to its popularity among viewers. © 1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc. ©1993 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

HOW AND WHAT DO CHILDREN LEARN FROM TELEVISION?

The paper provides a review and critical synthesis of research and theory dealing with the processes involved in children's learning from television. It asks how and what children learn from television, and at what ages television is a more or less powerful teacher. The focus is on assessing evidence that television can play a positive teaching role. It is suggested that a threshold model may be more appropriate than a linear model for evaluating television's impact on viewers. It is concluded that television can play a positive role in children's learning, but given typical North American media diets and current television content, the opposite has been true for most children.     

A Capacity Model of Children's Comprehension of Educational Content on Television

Many studies have shown that children of various ages learn from educational television, but they have not explained how children extract and comprehend educational content from these television programs. This paper proposes a model (the capacity model) that focuses on children's allocation of working memory resources while watching television. The model consists of a theoretical construct with three basic components (processing of narrative, processing of educational content, and distance, that is, the degree to which the educational content is integral or tangential to the narrative), plus several governing principles that determine the allocation of resources between narrative and educational content. A review of empirical research points to characteristics of both television programs and viewers that affect the allocation of resources under the model, as well as developmental influences on the relevant processing. Finally, implications for the production of effective educational television are discussed.     

The development of emotional face processing during childhood

Our facial expressions give others the opportunity to access our feelings, and constitute an important nonverbal tool for communication. Many recent studies have investigated emotional perception in adults, and our knowledge of neural processes involved in emotions is increasingly precise. Young children also use faces to express their internal states and perceive emotions in others, but little is known about the neurodevelopment of expression recognition. The goal of the current study was to determine the normal development of facial emotion perception. We recorded ERPs in 82 children 4 to 15 years of age during an implicit processing task with emotional faces. Task and stimuli were the same as those used and validated in an adult study; we focused on the components that showed sensitivity to emotions in adults (P1, N170 and frontal slow wave). An effect of the emotion expressed by faces was seen on the P1 in the youngest children. With increasing age this effect disappeared while an emotional sensitivity emerged on N170. Early emotional processing in young children differed from that observed in the adolescents, who approached adults. In contrast, the later frontal slow wave, although showing typical age effects, was more positive for neutral and happy faces across age groups. Thus, despite the precocious utilization of facial emotions, the neural processing involved in the perception of emotional faces develops in a staggered fashion throughout childhood, with the adult pattern appearing only late in adolescence.     

Television and beliefs about health care and medical treatment

A representative sample of London television viewers answered questions on their attitudes to the quality of medical care they might receive if hospitalized, on their beliefs about the scope for control over one’s health, on the Just World Scale, and on their experience of viewing each of three TV series dealing with health matters. One series is an anodyne soap opera, one a light-hearted talkshow, and the third is a powerful though cynical drama series. Viewing of the latter,The Nation’s Health, was negatively related to expectations of good treatment if hospitalized, a link that did not emerge with experience of the other two programs. Seen in greater detail, the ostensibly linear correlation appears more likely to be a U-shaped relationship with the heaviest viewers being resilient in confidence, unlike light viewers whose confidence may have been shaken enough to deter them from further viewing. The results are discussed as a parallel to the controversy between Gerbner et al. (1977) and Hirsch (1980).