Studies and writings on the effects of television on children are reviewed and summarized. Topics are the young people's pattern of exposure to television, the nature of their viewing experience, the way they respond to television, and the direct effects on their values, attitudes and behavior. Research on the influence of television violence on…

Sixty second grade children were randomly assigned to same sex pairs and each pair was randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: aggressive cartoon, nonaggressive cartoon, and no cartoon. Results indicated that there was no difference among the groups on measures of interpersonal aggression although boys exhibited significantly more…

As a result of personal observations of state institutions for the mentally handicapped, the author describes the tragic and inhuman conditions with vivid examples of specific patients and incidents. The account further explores the entire concept of human abuse which is propagated both by social institutions (such as the prison system) and by…

The first of these two articles presents the methods, results, and discussions of six experiments which employed an avoidance of time-out from positive reinforcement schedule with human subjects to investigate: (1) whether time-outs may be considered aversive events; and (2) if so, whether the aversiveness was sufficient to produce aggressive…

This document is Part I of an extensive cross cultural project, and focuses upon the development of behavior that relates the child both to authority figures in the salient social systems about him and to the rules designed to govern the behavior of members of the system. Systems include the family, school, community, nation, and religion.…

This paper describes the processes of Monitored Play-Therapy, a method which seeks to measure the changes which may take place over a number of play therapy sessions. The laboratory is in use at Georgia State College in Atlanta and is designed for boys seven through twelve years of age. The Monitored Playroom Laboratory consists of a control booth…

There are many unanswered questions about play therapy. Monitored play therapy is an attempt to discover answers to these questions. The main emphasis is on quantitative recording and analysis of the process and outcome of play therapy. However, because of its newness, monitored play therapy also has some weaknesses. The main strong point is the…

This study represents part of an extended research program designed to explore the various parameters of imaginative play in children and their relationship to the later development of daydreaming and various cognitive skills or personality characteristics. The specific focus of this investigation was on role of adult intervention represented…

Although attention should be drawn to the fact that girls in children's and adolescent fiction are stereotyped, it seems more serious that boys in such literature are far too often stereotyped as attaining manhood by a violent act against an animal--whether a pet or wild--or against other aspects of the natural world. Of greater impact are those…

This study examined the effects of differentially characterizing a model as "good", "bad", or "neutral" on preschool children's subsequent evaluation and imitation of the model. The model's aggressive and motor behaviors were more frequently imitated than were his non-aggressive and verbal behaviors. Instructions influenced the Ss' evaluation of…

In March of 1972 the Aspen Program on Communications and Society convened a meeting which brought together the Surgeon General, staff members connected with the Surgeon General's Report on Television and Violence, and social scientists. The purpose of the meeting was to evaluate the Report, which had just been issued. This conference report…

Depressed and nondepressed college students were frustrated in an incentive task utilizing a nonreward technique. Matched controls undertook a similar task in which the frustration condition was absent. Subjects were 127 undergraduate psychology students. Pre- and post-test measures of hostility and depression were obtained. The Beck Depression…

Written in the form of programmed instruction, this book is designed to help parents and teachers understand and correct situations in which a child's behavior is distressing. The book utilizes the social learning approach (that people learn most behavior patterns from other people). The first section discusses how parents and children learn and…

A generally held hypothesis is that greater family interaction will increase agreement between mother and child on reports of television viewing habits. This initial study sought to determine the extent of such agreement between mother and child, and to analyze the role of frequency of family interaction in their coorientation toward television…

This study investigated the hypothesis that high level language proficiency is associated with low observable aggression and low language proficiency is associated with high aggression. Sixteen black and eight Puerto Rican male fifth graders were the subjects of a test of this hypothesis. Four variables were examined: language proficiency,…