Tracking the psychosocial predictors of older individuals' television uses

The elderly spend considerable amounts of time with mass media, but little is known about the psychology of their viewing habits. This study compared the relative impact of social, structural, and psychosocial variables on the television uses of elderly viewers. The results of a survey of 113 older respondents indicated that psychosocial factors accounted for variance above and beyond that of demographic and situational factors in viewing of television entertainment programs, parasocial programs (e.g., soap operas), as well as in watching of television for companionship purposes. Emotional loneliness and locus of control proved particularly significant predictors of television behavior.     

Tracking the Psychosocial Predictors of Older Individuals' Television Uses

The elderly spend considerable amounts of time with mass media, but little is known about the psychology of their viewing habits. This study compared the relative impact of social, structural, and psychosocial variables on the television uses of elderly viewers. The results of a survey of 113 older respondents indicated that psychosocial factors accounted for variance above and beyond that of demographic and situational factors in viewing of television entertainment programs, para-social programs (e.g., soap operas), as well as in watching of television for companionship purposes. Emotional loneliness and locus of control proved particularly significant predictors of television behavior.     

LONELINESS,PARASOCIAL INTERACTION,AND LOCAL TELEVISION NEWS VIEWING

A conceptual model was developed predicting parasocial interaction from both a social interaction need due to loneliness and instrumental television news use. Questionnaires were completed by 329 persons. Pearson and partial correlations supported hypotheses linking loneliness with less interpersonal communication and both loneliness and parasocial interaction with more television reliance. Loneliness and parasocial interaction were not correlated. Canonical correlation analysis supported expectations that instrumental news viewing for information was related to more parasocial interaction and perceived news realism; viewing news for exciting entertainment, news affinity, and news viewing levels correlated positively with this pattern. Ritualized news viewing for time consumption was related to more television viewing, but to less news viewing, duration, and affinity. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis identified news affinity, perceived news realism, and information news viewing motives as salient predictors of parasocial interaction with a favorite local television news personality. Implications of results were discussed in light of uses and gratifications research and communication interaction.     

The Influence of Television Programs on Appearance Satisfaction: Making and Mitigating Social Comparisons to “Friends”

Studies of “media effects” on women’s appearance satisfaction have focused largely on images from fashion magazines and television commercials, and rarely on images from television programs. The present study reports on the effects of experimental exposure to a television situation-comedy depicting thin and highly physically-attractive characters on appearance satisfaction in Canadian undergraduate women (N?=?76) from a large, ethnically-diverse, metropolitan area. The results demonstrate a detrimental effect on participants’ satisfaction with their overall appearance, as measured on a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). This result is interpreted in line with social comparison theory. In addition, exposure to written intervention material, designed to remove the basis for social comparison with television images, was shown to be effective in mitigating this effect.     

Media use, face-to-face communication, media multitasking, and social well-being among 8- to 12-year-old girls

An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use--including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on phones/video chatting--and face-to-face communication. This study introduced both a more granular measure of media multitasking and a new comparative measure of media use versus time spent in face-to-face communication. Regression analyses indicated that negative social well-being was positively associated with levels of uses of media that are centrally about interpersonal interaction (e.g., phone, online communication) as well as uses of media that are not (e.g., video, music, and reading). Video use was particularly strongly associated with negative social well-being indicators. Media multitasking was also associated with negative social indicators. Conversely, face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being. Cell phone ownership and having a television or computer in one's room had little direct association with children's socioemotional well-being. We hypothesize possible causes for these relationships, call for research designs to address causality, and outline possible implications of such findings for the social well-being of younger adolescents.     

Social Capital, Television, and the "Mean World": Trust, Optimism, and Civic Participation

Robert Putnam argues that much of the decline in social trust and civic engagement in the United States can be attributed to increased television viewing. People who watch a lot of television are likely to believe that the real world is as "mean" as the "television world," and hence withdraw their trust from other people and decline to participate in civic affairs. Using data from the GSS and other surveys, I show that it is not television that makes people less trusting, but optimism for the future that makes people more trusting. When measures of optimism were used as determinants of trust in the estimation of a simultaneous equation model, the effects of television vanished. There is no support for the argument that television makes us less trusting because of the content of the shows we watch, or for the argument that television makes us withdraw from civic engagement because of the amount of time consumed by viewing. In addition, no evidence for specific cohort effects was found.     

Civic Engagement, Interpersonal Trust, and Television Use: An Individual-Level Assessment of Social Capital

The mechanisms underlying the formation and sustenance of social capital on the individual level were explored with a structural model composed of the endogenous variables of civic engagement and interpersonal trust. Using the 1995 DDB Needham life style study, analysis of the model permitted an examination of the strength and direction of the causal relationships driving the "virtuous circle" of participation and trust; the demographic, situational/contextual, orientational, and attitudinal factors that are exogenous to these latent variables; and the linkage between these components of social capital and viewing preferences for specific television genres. The results indicate that (1) the direction of the linkage between civic engagement and interpersonal trust is mainly from participating to trusting; and (2) television viewing plays a conditional role in the production of social capital that is dependent on the use of particular genres.     

Media Exposure and Exemplar Accessibility

This study investigated the relation between television exposure and the ease with which individuals can retrieve examples of social events. Ninety-six college students were prompted to think of examples of constructs, some of which are frequently portrayed on television. Perceived ease of retrieving the examples and the source of the examples were measured. Media examples were more frequently recalled for events portrayed often in the media but infrequently experienced personally (e.g., courtroom trial, murder). Personal experiences were the most easily retrieved for events encountered frequently in real life, even when these events are also frequently portrayed on television (e.g., highway accidents, dates). Ease of retrieving media examples was related to hours of TV viewing, but only for viewing of television programs in which the events were common and when the direct experience with the events was likely to be low. Results are discussed with respect to media's influence on social judgment and heuristic processing.     

The effects of television form and violent content on boys' attention and social behavior

An experiment is reported that examined the independent effects of television content (violence) and television formal features (action level) on children's attention to programs and their postviewing social behavior. Pairs of preschool boys participated in two experimental sessions in which they saw animated and live television programs that varied in violent content (high or low) and formal features (high or low action level). They then played with toys that contained cues for either aggressive or prosocial interaction. Rapid character action facilitated visual attention to the programs; violent tv content did not facilitate attention. On measures of social behavior, strong effects of toy cues were found independently of television treatment effects. Aggressive toys produced aggressive behavior, and prosocial toys produced prosocial behavior; these patterns included some nonspecific, generalized influences in addition to direct demands of the play materials. Violent tv content led to changes in subjects' style of interaction and was also associated with increases in some prosocial behaviors. Television action level had no systematic effects on subjects' behavior. Results are discussed within the theoretical frameworks of observational learning and general arousal. Implications for children's television programming are also discussed.     

The Perpetuation of Subtle Prejudice: Race and Gender Imagery in 1990s Television Advertising

Scholars have long argued that popular consumer culture is both producer and product of social inequality, but few detailed empirical studies have explored the ways that advertising imagery simultaneously constructs stereotypes of race and gender. This article reports on a content analysis of television commercials (n = 1699) aired on programs with high ratings for specific target audiences from 1992 to 1994. Characters in the television commercials enjoy more prominence and exercise more authority if they are White or men. Logistic regression analyses indicate that images of romantic and domestic fulfillment also differ by race and gender, with women and Whites disproportionately shown in family settings and in cross-sex interactions. In general, 1990s television commercials tend to portray White men as powerful, white women as sex objects, African American men as aggressive, and African American women as inconsequential. The authors suggest that these commercial images contribute to the perpetuation of subtle prejudice against African Americans by exaggerating cultural differences and denying positive emotions. Results are discussed in relation to the segmentation of media markets and possibilities for social change.     

Searching for Cognitive Processes in the Cultivation Effect Adult and Adolescent Samples in the United States and Australia

Research on the cultivation hypothesis has focused on whether relationships between television viewing and social reality beliefs truly exist or are artifacts. There is very little evidence about what cognitive processes allow viewers to construct television-biased beliefs. The present study tests two possible processes: First, that perceptions of the television world serve as an intermediate step between fragmented incidental learning from television and beliefs about the real world and second, that beliefs closely linked to television content are an intermediate step in implying more general values and beliefs. These two hypotheses were tested in one adult and three adolescent samples, two in the United States and two in Australia. Across a range of cultivation questions, the basic cultivation result generally replicated that heavy viewers had beliefs about the world that appeared influenced by television. However, neither process hypothesis was supported. Although the null findings on the first hypothesis do not rule out construction from learned fragments, findings on the second hypothesis contradict cultivation's second-order effect. “Close” beliefs and their implied counterparts were unrelated, and cultivation relationships for these implied variables occurred only for those with real-world biased “dose” beliefs. Exploration of this result demonstrated that cultivation of both kinds of beliefs occurred more of ten for adolescents with high academic skills, suggesting that if cultivation occurs, it is a more active and intellectually demanding process than previously proposed.     

Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice

This article looks at the role that narrative fiction—film, television, and literature—can play in countering and mitigating epistemic injustice. The notion of epistemic injustice is explicated by Miranda Fricker as a distinctive kind of injustice done to a knower in her role as a knower and is identified in two forms: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. The operation of both types of epistemic injustice depend upon the social imagination and the shared concepts of social identity within it—what it is to be a man, woman, straight, black, gay, transgender. It is here that narrative fiction becomes pertinent, as it has the potential to influence the social imagination for the better. Fricker uses fictional scenarios to clarify her notions of epistemic injustice; I argue that aside from elucidating analysis of our epistemic practices, fiction can also provide epistemic correctives. In the first through fourth sections of the paper, I explore ways in which narrative fiction can combat testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The fifth section then considers the unique features of narrative fiction in this capacity to resist epistemic injustice and argues that it capitalizes on advantages that other approaches cannot share in.     

Television Commercials as a Lagging Social Indicator: Gender Role Stereotypes in Korean Television Advertising

Previous studies of mass media in many countries have confirmed that images of women are stereotypical and unrealistic, particularly in television advertising. This study was designed to analyze the representation of gender roles in Korean television advertising and to compare the results with previous studies conducted in other countries. A sample of 878 Korean television advertisements from the MBC network in 2001 was content analyzed. Findings indicate that women in Korean television advertising were portrayed as young (48.2%), as dependent (37.5%), and as nurturing children (12.1%); they were often depicted in the home (37.2%). These stereotypical images of women have been found in television advertising in many countries. Korean society has changed a great deal in recent decades, but the images we analyzed do not reflect the current situation. Therefore, television commercials are a lagging social indicator of role changes.     

“We're not gonna be friends anymore”: Associations between viewing relational aggression on television and relational aggression in text messaging during adolescence

A number of studies suggest that adolescents who view relational aggression on television are more likely to engage in higher levels of subsequent relational aggression in social interactions. This study examined longitudinal associations between viewing relational aggression on television and relationally aggressive behavior in text messaging over a 1-year period during adolescence. Participants were 197 adolescents who completed a number of questionnaires regarding media use and aggression. Adolescents were each given a BlackBerry device and a sample of text messages was coded for aggressive behavior. Results revealed that exposure to relational aggression on television was associated with higher levels of relational aggression in texting one year later, but only for girls. Results are discussed with reference to the General Aggression Model.     

Portrayal of body weight on children's television sitcoms: a content analysis

Television programs portray characters with idealized body types that for most viewers are unattainable. These body types have become a common source of comparison for many young viewers who evaluate their own self-worth and bodies based on the models they see on television. This study examines body weight, both in terms of frequency and portrayals, focusing on how preadolescent and adolescent characters’ bodies are presented on the sitcoms from three children's television networks. The results indicate that while children's situation comedies have relatively few overweight characters, this small percentage closely parallels national figures. Male and female characters do not differ in their distribution across weight categories. However, when character ethnicity is factored, significant shifts occur. Surprisingly, no differences were observed in the portrayal of physical and mental attributes among weight categories except in social popularity where overweight characters were not as embedded in social networks. Compared to other relevant studies, this research provides some evidence that the treatment and portrayal of overweight characters in children-targeted sitcoms is more positive, equitable, and less stereotypical than in other programming venues and that children are experiencing body type diversity in these fictional portrayals. Nonetheless, above average weight characters still suffer some social marginality and ethnic misrepresentation.     

Legal and Social Issues Surrounding Closed-Circuit Television Testimony of Child Victims and Witnesses

Summary

Prosecution of crimes involving child victims and witnesses is particularly difficult because of the age of the children involved. Facing the alleged offender in court and the experience itself of testifying in an open court with dozens of onlookers are acutely difficult. The effect on children may be traumatic, with the potential to produce substantial psychological and emotional harm. Various court procedures have been implemented in the United States in an effort to minimize these effects. Court procedures can include erecting screens to shield the child victim or witness, presenting videotaped testimony, or testifying via one-way or two-way closed-circuit television. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) testimony, which is especially controversial, involves both legal issues surrounding the constitutionality of such testimony and social issues regarding the effectiveness of closed-circuit television testimony. Substantial variation across states in provisions for closed-circuit television testimony for child witnesses is problematic. Consideration is given to how social science research directly influenced the Supreme Court's decision in Maryland v. Craig(1990), and the current state of research regarding use of CCTV and court outcomes. Some research suggests a pro-defense bias when CCTV is used.     

Media and Metanoia: Documentary ‘Impact’ Through the Lens of Conversion

How do contemporary understandings of religious conversion and formation shed light on the “impact” and “effectiveness” of social change media? This paper evaluates three case studies, public television documentaries produced in the mid-1990s, to reflect on their social effect. Contemporary conversion theory provides a nuanced perspective with which to interpret the nature and circumstances under which social documentary—media created specifically so as to have a social effect—may in fact be said to have an “impact.” Innumerable media theorists have discredited market models where the uncritical television viewer gets off her couch straightaway and goes out to join a social movement in the same manner as she might buy a new brand of toothpaste, and yet an expectation of being able to demonstrate (often quantifiable) “results” insistently follows documentarians and public television outreach professionals. This “high-impact” model may be seen to be analogous to a “Road to Damascus” view of instant and permanent religious conversion, likewise discounted yet tenacious. It is an illuminating exercise to consider the operations of documentary media from the perspective of developmental conversion theorists such as Rambo, Tippett, Fowler, Lovland and Stark, and others. In this light, it is possible to understand both how these documentary case studies did create certain very particular kinds of change, as well as why most social documentaries, in truth, do not.     

A device that provides an eye-to-eye video perspective for interactive television

A device that allows individuals to engage in eye contact while interacting over two-way television is described. The apparatus consists of a television monitor and low light-level television camera housed within a cabinet containing a mirror system that resembles a combination beam splitter and periscope. Through the mirror system, the pick-up camera captures a reflected full-face eye-level image of the television viewer as he or she attends to the display monitor. The device is particularly useful for studying the nonverbal communication patterns of individuals engaged in social interaction.     

Children's strategies for controlling affective responses to aversive social experience

It was hypothesized that one mechanism of self-control that children develop is the strategic capacity to select the experiences they encounter. This hypothesis led to the prediction that children would deal with certain aversive social experiences by seeking out or taking advantage of opportunities for nurturant experiences. Young children were exposed to an aversive social experience in which they received less nurturance than a peer, a positive experience in which they received more nurturance, or a neutral experience in which nurturance was equal. Subsequently, an opportunity was provided for children to control the length of time they watched a highly nurturant television program. As predicted, boys experiencing an aversive social encounter increased the length of time they exposed themselves to the nurturant television show, and their level of reduced positive affect was related to how long they watched the nurturant content, further supporting the interpretation that they did so in response to their own affective state. Girls did not adopt the strategy of self-exposure to nurturant television but did appear to engage in self-distraction during the aversive social experience. Despite the apparent use of control strategies, there was no indication that these strategies were effective for the amelioration of reduced positive affect resulting from the aversive social experience. Discussion focuses on the sex differences observed in the adoption of strategic behavior and factors contributing to the ineffectiveness of the control strategies. A general model is proposed for personal and environmental factors requisite for the selection, employment, and effectiveness of strategies to control experiences and their affective consequences.     

Television Viewing and Public Perceptions of Attorneys

This investigation examines the way prime-time network television programming depicts attorneys, and the influence of these images on the public's perceptions of attorneys. In addition, the study examines some of the theoretical and methodological controversies identified with the cultivation explanation of the way television shapes perceptions of social reality. The results reveal that network prime-time television programming depictions of attorneys affect public perceptions of attorneys, particularly in terms of front region behaviors. The results involving attorneys’back region behaviors are mixed. In addition, the results indicate that content-specific viewing is a more reliable predictor than total viewing or select viewer sociodemographic variables of the public's tendency to perceive attorneys in the same way they are portrayed in prime-time television programming.