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Children's attention to television, measured by visual attention and by self-reports, varied in this study depending on the comprehensibility of the content. Children's visual attention was lower when they viewed Sesame Street, Greek, and backwards language bits than with randomly edited or normal bits, but their visual attention did not discriminate between random and normal bits. However, self-reports of effort to comprehend showed that the oldest children found the random bits harder to understand than the normal bits. Because the older children's visual attention was equivalent for two types of bits that they reported were different in difficulty, the results suggest that comprehensibility may be of limited value in explaining older children's active television viewing, but also that studies explicitly tying together visual attention, effort, perceptions of a wide variety of program characteristics, and comprehension are in order.

This article addresses several elaborations and specifications of Gerbner and Gross' (1976) cultivation hypothesis: that heavy television viewers incorporate biases present in television content into their own construc tions of reality. Subjects were 1280 children from grades 2, 5, 8, and 11 in Perth, Western Australia who answered questions designed to tap their perceptions of violence and "meanness" in society. The cultivation relation ship between viewing and beliefs was replicated with these Australian schoolchildren, but only for adolescents, suggesting that the integration of discrete television events into social reality beliefs requires cognitive skills not available to or unused by younger children. Division of children's viewing into different content types indicated that beliefs about violence stemmed most clearly from crime-adventure programs and cartoons, but perceiving a mean world is related more globally to all television viewing.

Children have previously been shown to redirect their attention actively away from Sesame Street segments rendered less comprehensible by either random ordering of scenes or alterations of the audio track (Greek or backward speech). In this study, the visual attention of 60 children, ages 3.5, 5, and 6.5, was tracked for smaller time units and showed an early (though not immediate) increase in attention to random segments, suggesting an attempt to deal with difficult but seemingly accessible content. Attention to segments with incomprehensible language decreased quickly and stayed low for all ages. Analyses of lengths of individual looks at television replicated the attentional inertia phenomenon, but with noteworthy differences between the three types of segments, and especially for looks at the television during latter parts of segments. The findings are interpreted in terms of Huston and Wright's sampling model of attention. Surprisingly, there was little evidence of developmental changes in these results.

During the course of illness, people diagnosed with cancer need information to cope with cancer. Despite the crucial role of information, little is known about why some people with cancer choose to seek further information about their illness and why others do not. This study investigates the interplay of two psychological factors, negative emotion and health self-efficacy, on patients' health information use. Using the data collected from 122 women diagnosed with breast cancer, the authors found that negative emotions and health self-efficacy jointly affect the use of health information. Among patients with high health self-efficacy, negative emotions were positively related to the amount of information sought, whereas among those with low health self-efficacy, negative emotions were negatively related to the amount of information sought. The results also show that there are significant increases in patients' health self-efficacy after the use of health information for 2 months.

Previous research and theory have focused on nonstrategic explanations for attentional inertia phenomena in television viewing (that looks become more stable and reflect greater cognitive engagement as they get longer). However, varying relatedness of episodes, for which strategic inertial processes should vary in strength, produces a corresponding difference in inertia of looks crossing those boundaries. Although an additive model would suggest that all these within-narrative boundaries should show stronger relationships than at unrelated-content boundaries, this was not the case. It may thus be that results previously interpreted as reflecting nonstrategic processes instead result from strategic processes not before considered.

The television systems of Sweden and the United States are different in very interesting ways, stemming from a combination of historical, economic, technical and cultural factors. This study investigated viewer behaviour in these two different systems, using variables constructed from television viewing diaries and questionnaire responses. Results showed five clusters of viewer behaviours for each country, with a general similarity in clusters between Sweden and the US. However, further analysis showed a surprising dissimilarity: while social class, gender and uses and gratifications all predicted viewer type in Sweden, none of these variables predicted viewer type in the US. The authors speculate that some of these differences may be structural, but others cultural.

Research on children's comprehension of television suggests that very young children have difficulty ordering major scenes from a story, and generally do not have adultlike understandings of television. More recent research with young children using short and simple stimuli and a method designed to maximize children's communication abilities suggests that these earlier studies may have underestimated children's comprehension. In this study, three- to five-year-olds viewed an 8-minute version of Diff'rent Strokes, and then were asked to reenact the story with dolls and appropriate props. Analyses of the quality of the stories showed that 70% of the children comprehended most of the event clusters of the program. While their versions of the story were not nearly as detailed or rich as adults' versions, they did not indicate that the children had constructed qualitatively different meanings from the story.

This article consolidates insights from 15 years of research examining howthe medically underserved use and benefit from an eHealth program, the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS). The authors outline results from early feasibility tests to determine if the underserved would use CHESS. Distinctive behaviors of underserved populations who have used CHESS are reported with a focus on how online health information and computer-mediated support groups are used. The article then reports on how the underserved benefit from using CHESS. Best practice recommendations for recruitment and training the underserved are offered, and implications for closing the digital divide are discussed.