Aggressive and Prosocial Events on Children’s Television Shows

March 27th, 2007
Abnormal Child Psychology (PSYO 3091)

It has been known for decades the effect that television has on the social aspect of development in children. Violence and aggression on television has resulted in similar behaviours in the children that watch those programs which has caused some reason for concern. A study by Singer & Singer (1986) demonstrated the effects that television violence and aggression can have on children. Likewise, Bankart & Anderson (1979) showed the effect that prosocial behaviour in television programs can have on preschoolers. These effects have been replicated it more recent studies which shows that it is a problem that is not limited to one generation or even one group of people. Boyatzis, Matillo & Nesbitt (1995) performed an experiment on the effects that the television program “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” had on children’s behaviours towards their peers. It was found that children, mostly boys that watched this show would emulate actions performed by the characters.

The programs that have aggression in them all seem to be directed at older children whereas programs that contain much prosocial behaviour seem to be aimed at younger children, mostly preschool aged. Rice, Huston, Truglio and Wright (1990) studied the positive effects that “Sesame Street” had on preschool-aged children. It was found that that program in particular resulted in a higher level of vocabulary development in children that watched that program. However, the study also compared the learning with children that were aged 5-7 and found that those children do not benefit as much as the younger children did. This would suggest that television aimed at younger children are more likely to teach them by providing examples of word-learning and prosocial activities where as programs aimed at older children are more likely to be for entertaining purposes instead of useful learning. This could be supported by the Norris, Colman and Aleixo (2003) paper that studied the correlation between the effectiveness of commercials and how entertaining a program was in which those commercials were intermingled with. Advertisements for children’s shows can be quite overt in attempts at trying to sell the product while preschool-targeted television shows quite often will not have advertisements at all.

The present study is comparing television programs that are targeted at preschool-aged children, school aged children and adolescents and the amount of prosocial events and aggressive events each group of shows contain. It was hypothesized that aggression is present more often in programs targeted at adolescents than preschoolers. Likewise, prosocial acts will diminish as the age of target audience increases, however not to the level that aggression will increase. Programs targeted at preschool-aged children, such as “Sesame Street”, often include social developmental situations, which involve sharing, including other children and reasoning whereas programs targeted at older children may sensationalize violence or aggression to hold the attention of the viewer but these shows may still contain a level of prosocial activity such as helping someone who’s been hurt.

Method
There were 89 participants, who were students, in the present study that collectively watched and coded 70 television programs over a total 10 channels. It was a between-measures design in which each participant was assigned to watch one channel for a total of two hours that would equal 4 programs. The participants were instructed to watch each show for exactly 20 minutes following the end of the opening theme and code the following: number of male and female characters; the sex of the lead characters; sex and age of the target audience; number of events with positive and negative messages; number of male and female sex stereotypes as well as non-sex stereotypes for males and females, for example, a male being portrayed in a role that would be typically done by a female and vise versa; number of prosocial acts; number of physical and verbally aggressive acts; and number of commercials. For the purpose of the present study, only the age of the target audience and the number of physical and verbal aggressive acts will be reviewed. When coding the target audience, there were three possibilities: pre-school aged, school aged and teens. When coding the actions by the characters on the programs, participants were told to count actions only once per interaction, for example, during a fight, the number of physical aggressive acts would be counted as one and not the number of times each character performs an action.

Results
For the results, all data for verbal and physical aggression were combined. There was a significant main effect between the target age of television programs and total aggression on the programs F(2,67) = 11.693, p < .001. A post hoc test was performed between programs of the three target-age groups. There was a significant difference between shows targeted at preschool and school-aged children in aggression as well as between shows targeted at school-aged and teenagers but not between shows targeted at school-aged and teenagers.

There was a significant main effect between target age of television shows and prosocial acts as well, F(2,67) = 18.487, p < .001. A post hoc test illustrated a significant difference between shows targeted at preschool and school-aged as well as preschool and teenager however only a marginal difference between school-aged- and teenager-targeted programs.

Discussion
The results showed a significant difference in the level of aggression present in shows directed at preschool-aged children and school-aged children however, there was a negative correlation between aggression in programs targeted school-aged and teenagers and no significant difference in aggression in shows for pre-school-aged and teenagers. This counters the hypothesis in that it was expected that there would be more aggression in shows targeted at older children and less in shows targeted at younger children. There was also a significant difference in the number of prosocial events between programs targeted at preschool-aged children and school aged children as well as between preschool-aged- and teenager-targeted programs. There was also a difference in prosocial events between school-aged-targeted programs and teenager-targeted programs but it was not significant. These results closer replicate the hypothesis in that the older the target audience, the less prosocial activity would be present. It would be expected that aggression would increase linearly as the age of the target audience increased where prosocial activities would decrease, but not to as great a degree as prosocial activities can still occur in the midst of violent scenes where the characters may help each other out or protect other people. Thus, that could be a limitation in the present study involving the definition of what makes a prosocial event. While it was described before the coding began, it is possible that different participants considered prosocial events to be different from others and when coding this area among the other areas of coding, misinterpreting an event would not be difficult to do. Further studies may be needed to look solely at prosocial events in children’s television programming to determine whether the change between target audiences is as apparent as it was in the present study.

References

Barkart, C.P. & Anderson, C.C., (1979). Short-term effects of prosocial television viewing on play of preschool boys and girls. Psychological Reports. 44(3). 935-941.

Boyatzis, C.J., Matillo, G.M. & Nesbitt, K.M. (1995). Effects of “The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” on children’s aggression with peers. Child Study Journal. 25(1). 45-55.

Norris, C.E., Colman, A.M. & Aleixo, P.A. (2003). Selective exposure to television programmes and advertising effectiveness. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 17. 593-606.

Rice, M.L., Huston, A.C., Truglio, R. & Wright, J. (1990). Words from “Sesame Street”: Learning vocabulary while viewing. Developmental Psychology. 26(3). 421-428.

Singer, J.L. & Singer, D.G. (1986). Family experiences and television viewing as predictors of children’s imagination, restlessness, and aggression. Journal of Social Issues. 42(3). 107-124.