The Effects of Nonsexist Television Commercials and Perceptions of Reality on Children's Attitudes About Women

To test the hypothesis that television content can teach sex-typed attitudes, this study presented third and eighth graders with television commercials showing either traditional or nontraditional women. Crossing this manipulation, the children's perceptions of the reality of the commercials were altered with instructions that the characters in the commercials were all real people (reality set), that they were all acting (acting set), or that the commercials were just like ones seen at home (no instructions). Results showed that the children's perceptions of reality were successfully manipulated, and that younger children thought all content was more real. The two sets of commercials were found to have a significant differential impact on the children's attitudes about women only for groups that had been in-structed about reality. For these groups, there was an interaction with sex of subject so that eighth grade boys had more traditional attitudes about women after viewing the nontraditional women, while all other groups showed the reverse pattern of means. Finally, rather than the predicted interaction, perceived reality had a main effect such that children who believed the characters to be acting were less traditional in their attitudes about women. This result is supported by a matching correlation between the two variables for the noninstructed groups.     

What Produces Television Attention and Attention Style?

Individual looks at television vary enormously in length, and this has previously indicated differences in ongoing cognitive processes. Furthermore, the relative frequency of looks of different lengths may indicate styles of attention to television. This article compares visual attention of 152 subjects across a variety of genres and examines differences located by situation, person, and media perception variables. Attention style was not consistent for individuals but varied for different types of programming and between‐program breaks. Situational, person, and media belief variables did not predict the proportions of four types of looks. They did, however, predict differences in the proportion of moderately short (orienting) looks across types of content, but not the previously more important very short (monitoring) or moderately long (engaged) looks. The overall importance of type of content in these results suggests that further research should examine within‐program differences in message construction and assess attentional style as patterns or sequences of looks.