PROSOCIAL MEDIA

 Neglecting prosocial aspects of the media  Perceiving psychology as a field dealing with negative aspects, psychopathology  Seligman and “Positive Psychology”

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 Most of the things we discussed for violent media might be valid for prosocial media  Modeling  Priming  Excitation transfer

 Prosocial behavior: Any behavior which is done for the benefit for other people.

 Altruism  Reactive/proactive prosocial behaviors

 The studies indicated similar effects with antisocial media  Empathy aroused media  Educational / Informational Programs (E/I)

 Ex: Sesame Street  was designed to educate preschool children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds about the alphabet, basic mathemathics and interpersonal relations.

http://www.sesamestreet.org/

 The content and the production was parallel to research  Ex: To introduce love, marriage and pregnancy, studies were conducted to learn the weakest knowledges of children about these issues, and these knowledges were turned to scripts.  If pre-show studies indicated negative effects (ex: the show about divorce), the show haven’t been broadcasted.  Over 1000 researches have conducted to study its impact

 Study results:  Positive effect on knowledge of alphabet and numbers, names of body parts, recognition of forms, sorting and classification skills ( Ball & Bogatz, 1970).

 Viewers were rated more ready to school by their teachers ( Bogatz & Ball, 1971).

 Long-term positive effects on school adjustment after three years ( Wright & Huston, 1995)  Long-term positive effects on English, Mathematics and Science even in high school years (Anderson, Huston, Wright, & Collins, 1998)

 Impact on Social Behavior  Increase in cooperation (Paulson, 1974)  Reduction in verbal and physical aggression (Bankart & Anderson, 1979)  Increase in prosocial/altruistic behaviors (Zielinska & Chambers, 1995)

 Gave chance to families discussing on death with their preschool children  Tried to decrease interracial conflicts  After 11th September 2001

 In International broadcasts, the content was revised according to the local values.

 Children gained basic skills especially in literacy and numeracy areas, from watching Sesame Street coproductions in almost all countries.

 A study from Turkey (Sahin, 1992) noted similar effects of

Susam Sokagi, the Turkish adaptation of Sesame Street.

 The study evaluated the pre- and post broadcast performance on a range of curricular skills of 1,166 children between the ages of 3 and 6.

 Comparing same-age peers before and after exposure to the broadcast, children who watched the program performed better on a range of curricular skills (e.g., number concepts, language)

 If we believe that violent television can produce enduring negative effects on children's behavior, then it seems reasonable to expect that E/I television programs can produce enduring positive effects as well.

 These results are more valid for middle/upper-middle class children  The effect of parental mediation

 PARENTAL MEDIATION  Children may be more vulnerable to negative effects of media when they use it lonely (until a certain age)  Parents can help their children to read media messages efficiently  Parents can direct their children towards the media with more educational or prosocial content

 One of the categorizations for parental mediation:  Social coviewing: passive  Restrictive mediation: prohibiting the content or timing of media use  Instructive mediation: involves talking and discussion

 Another categorization:  Nonmediators: passive coviewers with child  Optimists: trusting TV as a babysitter  Pessimists: distrusting TV  Selectives: selecting TV programs according to the content

 Effective mediation requires parents to discuss the program content with the child

 For prosocial aspects parental mediation enhances identification with positive values or increases empathy for the victim  For violent/antisocial aspects, it may separate reality and fantasy

 Media can also be used to instruct parents how to solve problems related with parenting and family  Ex: ‘Families’ in Australia  Source:  The Mass Media and the Prevention of Child Behavior Problems: The Evaluation of a Television Series to Promote Positive Outcomes for Parents and Their Children

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 The program significantly reduced parental perceptions of children's disruptive behavior and significantly increased self reported competence of mothers in the television viewing condition. Similar results were not evident in the waitlist control group.

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 The programs for teens  Hannah Montana  Drake and Josh  The Amanda Show  That’s so Raven  Boy Meets World  The Suite Life of Zack and Cody  Sister, Sister

 Media campains  Campains forced military service for children,mines, AIDS, traffic accidents, human trafficing, radical nationalism etc.

 Campains to help disadvantaged regions of the world

 Critical thinking:  Are positive effects valid for all ages?

 Recent research showed that very young children can negatively effected from E/I programs.

 Ex: Zimmerman and Christakis (2007) found that for infants and toddlers between 8 and 16 months old, receptive vocabulary (i.e. words understood) was lower for those who watched E/I programs.

 A possible reason: Video Deficit Effect  Infants and toddlers learn better from real-life people than from the characters in videos  Ex: Toddlers learn object labels better from a person face to face than from a video of that same person (Krcmar, Grela, & Lin, 2007).

 When told the location of a hidden toy face to face, 77% of 2 year olds succesfully retrieved the object but when toddlers received the same information from a video, only 27% could find the toy (Troseth et al., 2006).

 It seems that infants and toddlers are more attended to socially relevant information (information from a social partner with social cues including contingent responding, eye gaze and pointing.)

 Young children learn that the behavior of televised characters is unrelated to what they are doing (i.e. Noncontingent responding) and that televised characters are unresponsive to their needs.  This may hinder the learning.

 Additional limitations of E/I programs:  For children at risk for academic problems and for children with already well-developed skills, the benefits of E/I media appear to be limited.

 Knowledge-based learning but not skill-based learning is easily enhanced by E/I media.

 Computer software programs as E/I tools  More interactive than TV  The findings are inconsistent however computer assisted instruction is definitely beneficial for children with learning disabilities because of unlimited chance for practice.

 Music and academic achievement  Mozart Effect: Myth or Reality?

 Based on experimental research using adult participants, spatial abilities increased following exposure to classical music (Rausher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993).

 Although preschoolers do perform better on tests of cognitive abilities after listening to Mozart, children’s test scores increased after any kind of music they liked (Schellenberg, 2005).

 There is no scientific evidence for Mozart effect.

 Media literacy (decoding the media messages in adaptive ways) seems the best way to increase the positive effects and decrease the negative effects.

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 Greitemeyer, T. (2011). Effects of Prosocial Media on Social Behavior: When and Why Does Media Exposure Affect Helping and Aggression?

Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20,

251-255.

 The author discusses a theoretical model and recent findings which focus on how media exposure affects prosocial and antisocial outcomes.

 General Learning Model

 According to this model, personal variables (ex: sex, age) and situation variables (such as media exposure) may independently and sometimes interactively affect a person’s internal state (ex: cognition, affect, and arousal) related to the media content. This internal state affects how events are perceived and interpreted, which in turn influence behavioral responses.

 GLM explains how prosocial media increases prosocial outcomes and decreases antisocial outcomes.

Effects of Video Games With Prosocial Content

 The main aim is to benefit another game character

 Gentile and colleagues (2009) found that prosocial video game exposure was significantly associated with helping behavior, cooperation and sharing, and empathy.

 Two longitudinal samples further revealed that prosocial video game exposure significantly predicted prosocial behavior 3 to 4 months later

 An experimental study showed that prosocial (relative to neutral) video game exposure increased helping and tended to decrease aggression.

 Another exprimental study showed that after playing a prosocial game, half of the gamers helped to a woman whom harrased by her ex-boy friend (Greitemeyer, & Osswald, 2010).  Only 1/5 of the participants who played tetris helped.

 In another study (Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2011), it was shown that prosocial video gaming increased priming to prosocial cognitions.

 Playing prosocial video games is also (negatively) related to the accessibility of aggressive cognitions (Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2009).

 Greitemeyer, Osswald, and Brauer (2010) found that playing a prosocial video game increases prosocial affect (empathy) and decreases antisocial affect.

Effects of Music With Prosocial Lyrics

 Listening to music with prosocial lyrics increases empathy, which in turn evokes helping behavior (Greitemeyer, 2009b).

 In five studies, Greitemeyer (2011) tested and found support for the hypothesis that prosocial (relative to neutral) music exposure decreases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts, state hostility, and aggressive behavior.

 Self-testing