Suchergebnisse

The study was designed to establish the longitudinal relationships between the frequency with which children watch violent and nonviolent dramatic programs and three types of daydreaming styles: positive-intense, aggressive-heroic, and dysphoric. A sample of Dutch children (N = 744) was surveyed when they were in grades 3 and 5 and resurveyed 1 year later. Results indicate that children's daydreaming styles in Year 1 did not affect their television viewing in Year 2. However, television viewing in Year 1 did influence children's daydreaming in Year 2. Whereas earlier studies provided only evidence that certain types of television content can stimulate daydreaming about themes that correspond to that content, the present study provides indications that television programs can also repress daydreaming. A positive-intense daydreaming style was found to be stimulated by watching nonviolent children's programs and to be inhibited by watching violent dramatic programs. An aggressive-heroic daydreaming style was stimulated by watching violent dramatic programs and inhibited by watching nonviolent programs.

Experiments comparing television and print news have shown that children learn most from television, whereas adults learn most from print. An experiment was conducted in which both 96 children (5th and 6th graders) and 96 adults (university students) were presented with a sequence of five news stories, either in their original televised form or in a printed version. Half of the participants were presented with stories taken from a children's news program (high audiovisual redundancy), whereas the other participants were exposed to corresponding stories adopted from an adult news program (low audiovisual redundancy). Results indicated that both children and adults learned most from television stories when presented in a children's news format, whereas the recall advantage of television disappeared when adult news stories were involved. The results suggest that the correspondence between verbal and visual content of television stories is decisive for the relative effectiveness of television and print.

An experiment was designed to investigate how television commentary during soccer matches affects children's judgments on aggressive fouls. Dutch children (N = 96) from grades 5 and6 watcheda series of fouls on video with three types of commentary: disapproving, neutral, or approving. When the commentator disapproved of the players' aggressive actions, children rejected the fouls more strongly than when the commentator approvedof the actions. The commentary effect was found with fouls among two foreign players, fouls by foreign players against Dutch players, andfouls by Dutch players against foreign players. The commentary effect appeared to apply not only to children who did not particularly like soccer matches on television but even to children who fancied the genre.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of two types of background television programs on students' performance on easy and difficult homework assignments. In both experiments, students in Grade 8 (Experiment 1: N = 90; Experiment 2: N = 144) were matched on reading proficiency. Subsequently, the participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions in which they did homework with (a) a Dutch-language soap opera, (b) English-language music videos, or (c) no television in the background. The execution of homework was hindered only when it was combined with watching a soap opera. The distraction effect of the soap opera was expressed either in a performance decrement (Experiment 1) or in an extension of performance time (Experiment 2).