The Influence of Television on Behavior

    Television is a controversial topic on its educational and entertainment sides. There are some great educational programs out there for kids; counting, spellings, general knowledge. But most of what see is entertainment with characters we can relate to and nothing of real educational purposes. Kids end up watching these and because they can connect with the characters and see themselves as THEM, they end uo wanting to do whatever the character is doing. Even if its aggressive.

If the kid is watching  relatively aggressive program with fighting and gore, they are more likely to gain aggressive traits such as using force to get their ideas across especially if they are the same sex as the character. In the 15 year longitudinal study of 557 done by Psychologist L. Rowell Huesmann, Ph.D, showed just this. The first step was identifying what TV shows they watched and how violent they where. 15 years later they talked to the same people, now in their 20s, and measured how violent they are. They found that the kids who had watched more violent shows had more violent traits or convicted of a crime. Watchign these shows had increased their aggressive behaviors and changed them in a negative way. Similarly, a study conducted by Kimball and Zabrack (1986), found that after only 2 years of television being introduced into a Canadian town, that the children became significantly more aggressive. 

Bandura's Bobo Doll Experiment

Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment

Aim: The aim was to see if children could be influenced in an aggressive way by the means a model showing them.

Participants: between the ages of 42 months and 71 months

Results: the children exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to act in physically aggressive ways than those who were not exposed to the aggressive model

Results: gender differences strongly supported Bandura's prediction that children are more influenced by same-sex models

Conclusion: Children are easily influence when in the presence of a same- sex aggressive model.

Limits: upper-middle class and rich whites were able to afford putting their children in a nursery. Thus, the subjects would turn out to be mostly white and of similar backgrounds

What Factors Make us More Likely to imitate the behavior of a model? 
- Relation (Family, stranger…)
- Gender

Punishment VS Reinforcement and Observational Learning

Negative Punishment 

• A teenage girl stays out for an hour past her curfew, so her parents ground her for a week.
• After getting in a fight with his sister over who gets to play with a new toy, the mother simply takes the toy away.

Positive Punishment 

• Because you're late to work one morning, you drive over the speed limit through a school zone. As a result, you get pulled over by a police officer and receive a ticket.
• Your cell phone rings in the middle of class, and you are yelled at by your teacher for not turning your phone off before to class.

Negative Reinforcement 

• Before heading out for a day at the beach, you slather on sunscreen in order to avoid getting sunburned.
• On Monday morning, you leave the house early in order to avoid getting stuck in traffic and being late for class.

Positive Reinforcement 

• After you get a correct answer in class, your teacher says, "Great job!"
• At work, you exceed this month's sales quota so your boss gives you a bonus. 

Observational Learning 

• An inexperienced salesperson is successful at a sales meeting after observing the behaviors and statements of other salespeople.
• A kid watches a basketball game, then shoots hoops without being taught how to do so.
• A new employee avoids being late to work after seeing someone else fired for being late.

Aggression in TV Shows and Their Relation to Violence in Young Adults

Childhood Exposure to Media Violence Predicts Young Adult Aggressive Behavior

·who conducted the study

Psychologists L Rowell Huesmann and Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl Lynn Podolski, Leonard D. Eron

·the aim

To show if Children's viewing of violent TV shows, their identification with aggressive same-sex TV characters, and their perceptions that TV violence is realistic are all linked to later aggression as young adults, for both males and females.

·the participants

557 people (when first started when aged 6-10 but the second part they were in their 20’s

·the results

The people who had watched High violent shows and connected with the characters showed more instances of overall aggression (committing crimes, being physical with spouses)

·      The conclusion

Children watching High Violence TV shows where more likely to become aggressive in their adult years than those of non-violent watching viewers.

Cultural Differences in Perception

       Face in Crowd Perception                                                     

These study were conducted by Gernot Horstmann and his colleagues at Bielefeld Univerversity, Germany. They asked their subjects to look into a crowed of neutral faces and find a happy or sad face. They then measured how long it took them to find the face. They found that when the emotion was shown with a closed mouth, it took the participants longer to find and when it was signaled with and open mouth, they found it quicker. This experiement disproves the previous thought that people can spot an angry face faster, but rather when teeth are visible. 

Info take from: A Toothy Grin or Angry Snarl Makes It Easy to Stand out in a Crowd: Visible Teeth Are Key

Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120614182554.htm

Facial Expressions Across Cultures

This study was conducted by Rachel E. Jack of The University of Glasgow. What she did was record the different eye movements of 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians while the looked at pictures with emotionally expressive faces. They would have to put the faces into different categories: Happy, Sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry or neutral. These faces were designed to be standardized "such that each expression displayed a specific combination of facial muscles typically associated with each feeling of emotion" (Cell Press). What they found was that Asians mostly looked at the eyes, almost ignoring the mouth, and determined the expression from there, while Caucasians looked at the whole face to determine the emotion. Its important to understand the different way in which cultures understand emotions in our broadening world with many different diverse people. 

Info Taken from: Perception of Facial Expressions Differs Across Cultures

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110901105510.htm

Perception In the Pygmies of the Congo

            Colin Turnball was a British Anthropologist who in 1959 traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to learn more about the indigenous tribe living there, the BaMbuti Pygmies. This tribe got its name from their small stature.Because the deep in the forest with hardly any visibility, being small is especially  helpful in climbing trees. Tunballs' main goal of his exhibition was to bring back items from the tribes' daily lives to contribute tot the Museum of Natural History in England. 

           While there, he discovered something he didn't expect to. While he and a Pygmie he had befriend were driving into an open field with Buffalo grazing, the Pygmie asked what kind of insects those where. In his mind, he couldn't see that the Buffalo were small because they were far away. Upon driving closer, and the animals getting bigger, Kenge, the Pygmie, thought that it was witchcraft how somehow the buffalo were shrunk then grew. This happens again at a large lake where Kenge can't see the figure how so many people can fit onto one boat the size a floating piece of wood where in reality its a quite large boat, just far out on the lake. Turnball discovered that size consistency was the problem. Kenge couldn't see that the herd was smaller because they were far, and bigger because they were closer. In conclusion, distance and perception is learned over a period of time in your early childhood. 
             A limitation for this experiment could possibly be that it was just one individual. Maybe it was just Kenge that was affected by this. Because this wasn't experimented on any other Pygmie, we won't know for sure if this is a continued occurrence in the tribe. 

Emotions Chart

Emotions Chart