30

Prosocial TV Content

Children's Interpretations and Responses

Marie-Louise Mares

Television as a Prosocial Force

Can television content be used to foster prosocial attitudes and behaviors among young viewers? The answer suggested by forty years of research is “yes” – but it often seems to take more than unaided viewing and it can be challenging given the complexity of real world conditions. The central conclusion of this chapter is that prosocial TV content appears to have the greatest chance of success when viewed with an adult who encourages related discussion or activities. Even content produced with the best of intentions often has relatively small effects or no observable effects at all when children simply watch on their own at home.

There are several possible explanations. One has to do with media diets – those who watch prosocial television may often watch lots of other, less positive content as well (Rosenkoetter, Huston, & Wright, 1990; Wiegman, Kuttschreuter, & Baarda, 1992). An additional explanation, the main one I explore here, is that young viewers interpret prosocial media content quite differently than the adults who produce it for them. Given that the narrative structures of prosocial programs are often quite complex, young viewers may need help understanding the intended lessons and elaborating on them in ways that would lead to positive changes in attitudes and/or behaviors.

It is useful to begin by specifying what types of research are being considered here. My primary interest relates to the use of real television content to help children be inclusive, friendly, and cooperative in their social interactions. Part of that effort involves trying to mitigate the effects of negative or restrictive stereotypes. This chapter does not focus on the early experimental studies of the 1970s in which researchers generated their own content to examine the effects of modeling on altruism (e.g., generosity, helping, cooperation) and self-control (e.g., avoiding temptations to lie, cheat, or steal), though these are reviewed elsewhere (e.g., Mares, Palmer, & Sullivan, 2008; Mares & Woodard, 2001) and have been included in two meta-analyses of prosocial media effects (Hearold 1986; Mares & Woodard, 2005).

Following an initial swell of research in the 1970s, the question of how to promote friendliness, cooperation, and similar qualities via media content received relatively little attention for several decades. The issue became more salient again in the United States with the Federal Communication Commission's 1996 guideline that broadcast stations must offer at least three hours a week of educational/informative (E/I) children's programming in order to receive expedited license renewal. Content analyses of E/I programming (aired in Philadelphia in 1989–2000), found that the majority of the networks' educational offerings focused on socioemotional rather than traditional curricular lessons, such as the importance of getting along with others, being honest, overcoming prejudice, or feeling good about oneself (Jordan, 2004; Jordan, Schmitt, & Woodard, 2001). Given the mandate to produce programming with positive educational or socioemotional outcomes, the question arose again about how to achieve such goals.

But, it is worth noting why the topic languished for so long. Liebert and Sprafkin, two prominent researchers in the area of prosocial effects during the 1970s, wrote a textbook a decade later (Liebert & Sprafkin, 1988) in which they reflected on the concern that began to escalate about prosocial media content as a form of brainwashing and manipulation. As they describe it, a national ad campaign to promote friendly interactions between children was met with increasing alarm as critics pointed out that cooperation and other forms of prosocial behavior need not be considered good qualities – rather, children may need to be tough and competitive in order to succeed (Karp, 1984; Rivers, 1974).

Brown and Singhal (1990) raised a series of similar ethical issues about the increased international use of entertainment programming to promote a variety of social goals such as overcoming alcoholism, adoption of modern agricultural practices, and sexual responsibility. They noted the dilemmas about who should get to decide which values should be promoted as well as the potential (present in any content) for unintended negative consequences. Their ultimate conclusion was that viewers should be informed about the intended persuasive effects of prosocial content so that they can decide whether to watch, or allow their children to watch.

In the United States, the current practice is for most educational/prosocial programs for children to be accompanied by a website that explains the goals of the program and provides descriptions of sample episodes. This, of course, does not mean that parents know about this material or bother to read it. In international efforts, particularly those that are coproductions with Western media corporations, there remain the lurking issues of cultural imperialism and the imposition of Western values in places where they are inappropriate or unwelcome. The response of one major institution that has been at the forefront of international educational efforts, Sesame Street, has been to emphasize the cooperative aspects of coproduction. That is, programming goals and strategies are developed in close collaboration with educators, policymakers, and producers in the specific region.

Overall, then, prosocial interventions should involve working closely with others in cross-cultural contexts to avoid an imposition of values. Further, the ideal scenario would be that prosocial television programs would be attractive enough to make children watch voluntarily, and effective enough to produce positive outcomes from watching at home under normal conditions. However, much of the research suggests that children often need more assistance.

Weak Effects of Unaided Viewing at Home

In an early study, Friedrich and Stein (1973) studied the effects of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood – a live action program aired in the United States in which the main character, Mr. Rogers, consistently modeled friendly, supportive interactions. Short segments occasionally depicted social dilemmas faced by puppet friends, and these were resolved in prosocial ways. Friedrich and Stein began their field experiment with 97 three- to five-year-olds by examining the initial relationships between self-selected home viewing of Mister Rogers' and children's classroom behaviors (e.g., cooperation and empathy) during the baseline three-week period. None of the measures were significantly related to home viewing, either in the group as a whole or among specific subgroups of children.

Similar lack of effects were reported by Sprafkin and Rubinstein (1979) in their study of the home viewing choices and classroom behaviors of 500 middle-class seven- to nine-year-olds in the United States, and by Wiegman et al. (1992) in their three-year longitudinal study of 466 seven-year-olds and nine-year-olds from large urban districts in the Netherlands. At all three times of measurement, Wiegman et al. found only trivial, nonsignificant correlations between home viewing of prosocial content and roster-ratings of prosocial classroom behavior. They noted that children who watched a lot of prosocial programming tended to be heavy viewers who also watched a lot of antisocial content.

Studies that have examined the relationship between self-selected exposure to entertainment programming featuring non-traditional or counter-stereotypical portrayals also report weak effects. Rosenwasser, Lingenfelter, and Harrington (1989) looked for correlations between children's knowledge of three US programs featuring relatively non-traditional gender roles (The Cosby Show, Growing Pains, and Who's the Boss?) and non-traditional gender role beliefs. Only 4 out of 25 correlations were significant – barely above chance. Mares and Acosta (2010) studied a US sample of 128 four- to six-year-olds, and found no significant relationships between children's self-reported frequency of viewing 20 programs that purportedly taught inclusiveness and positive interactions, and children's interest in having classmates of different race/ethnicity or gender.

Rosenkoetter (1999) asked two samples of US 6- and 8-year-olds how often they watched 30 adult situation comedies (rated for level of prosocial content), and asked the mothers how often their child engaged in positive behaviors such as sharing and helping others. In one study, Rosenkoetter found a fairly strong positive correlation (r = .57) between prosocial situation comedy viewing and prosocial behavior, but only among the 6-year-olds (not the 8-year-olds) and without any controls for background variables except gender. In another study reported in the same paper, Rosenkoetter found a small, marginally significant correlation between viewing adult prosocial situation comedies and mothers' reports, but only among children who were able to identify the moral lesson in a sample episode of Full House. There was no relationship between prosocial viewing and behavior among the children who did not perform well on this task, consistent with the argument that comprehension (or the lack of it) is a mediator of the effects of home viewing.

Why Might Young Viewers Need Help Interpreting Prosocial Content?

One answer is that young viewers often need help interpreting any narrative (not just prosocial ones) because of developmental cognitive constraints. As outlined in Fisch's (2000) cognitive capacity model, young viewers have a smaller working memory and less background knowledge to use in understanding a televised story. Thus, more complex narratives tax the limited resources available and increase the odds that viewers will miss or misunderstand much of the content.

Research suggests that young children (up to age eight) remember less content from a television program than older children or adults (Van den Broek, Lorch, & Thurlow, 1996). When they do remember events, they often have difficulty understanding how they are connected – how one event caused another, which in turn led to a later outcome (Collins, Wellman, Keniston, & Westby, 1978). Moreover, the types of information that seem very relevant to prosocial outcomes may be the most likely to be forgotten – how a character feels (Hayes & Casey, 1992; Knowles & Nixon, 1990; Thompson & Myers, 1985), what their motives are (Van den Broek, 1989) or what the consequences are for being nice or nasty (Collins, Berndt, & Hess, 1974). Not surprisingly, given their lesser attention to emotions, young children are less likely (though not unable) to be upset by a character's display of fear or misery (Wilson & Cantor, 1985).

A second point, as Fisch (2000) noted (and as Anderson and colleagues discuss at more length in Chapter 29, this volume), is the addition of educational material to narratives, which tends to increase the cognitive load for young viewers. The greater the load, the more likely it is that some content will simply not be noticed or that other content will be misunderstood or forgotten.

Third, research suggests that information about social groups is filtered through preexisting schemas, such that schema-consistent information is remembered best, and schema-inconsistent information is often forgotten or distorted (see Chapter 13, this volume). For example, Bigler and Liben (1993) had children listen to stories in which African-American and European-American characters interacted. In one condition, the African-American character was lazy (or mean, or dirty); in the counter-stereotypical condition, the African-American character was presented positively and the European-American character held the negative attributes. Children who were more cognitively mature and could classify stimuli along multiple dimensions were better able to remember the counter-stereotypical story. Less advanced children and those who initially held the most negative racial stereotypes often misremembered the counter-stereotypical stories. In their “version” the attributes were reversed to conform to their initial perceptions that the African-American character would have the negative attributes. Other studies have demonstrated the same reversals in memory for counter-stereotypical gender portrayals (e.g., Cordua, McGraw, & Drabman, 1979; Liben & Signorella, 1993).

Finally, young viewers may need help with prosocial content because of the specific developmental challenges of extracting moral lessons from narratives, particularly given the common structures of televised prosocial narratives in the United States.

“The Moral” as Especially Misunderstood Content

Narvaez (1998) has argued that children tend not to interpret moral lessons in stories in the same way as adults, because the act of extracting an overarching theme about a moral principle is shaped not only by cognitive development but also by moral development. In one study, Narvaez, Gleason, Mitchell, and Bentley (1999) had 8-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and undergraduates read stories in which the main character faced a moral dilemma (e.g., whether to return extra change), and then choose which of four short messages and four short vignettes best captured the moral theme of the story. The 8-year-olds chose the correct vignette 11% of the time (below chance), and the 10-year-olds made the correct choice 45% of the time, compared to 91% for the undergraduates. Similar developmental patterns were also observed in another study (Narvaez, Bentley, Gleason, & Samuels, 1998), in which children with less developed moral schemas tended not to recall story content related to more advanced moral reasoning – in effect, age groups varied in the lessons they were extracting.

Not surprisingly, research indicates that it is harder for children to extract a “grown-up” version of the moral message if the story is a fable or is otherwise unrealistic (Goldman, Reyes, & Varnhagen, 1984). Jose, D'Anna, and Krieg (2005) reported that kindergarten and second grade children often misunderstood simple metaphors (e.g., a person can be emotionally “cold”) and proverbs (e.g., “all that shines is not gold”), and that comprehension of these forms was associated with greater ability to extract the moral of a fable. The more realistic the story (Lehr, 1988) or the closer an analogy to a real-world task (Gentner & Toupin, 1986) the better young children perform in recognizing the theme or applying the information to their own situation.

Identifying the Prosocial Lesson of Television or Film Narratives

How well do children do at identifying the intended lesson of audiovisual narratives? Rosenkoetter (1999) had 81 first, third, and fifth graders watch an episode of The Cosby Show, a US live-action situation comedy featuring the comedian Bill Cosby and his television family. Rosenkoetter identified six different moral issues in the episode he showed students (e.g., it is wrong to steal, wrong to lie, good to forgive). Virtually all students in each grade correctly identified at least one lesson, but it took rather more probing (up to five questions per lesson) to elicit the others. In another study in the same paper, he showed 73 first and third graders an episode of a different situation comedy, Full House, in which the main character had to decide whether to throw easy pitches to her boyfriend on an opposing baseball team and thereby make her team lose. When asked, approximately 80% of children said that they thought there was a moral lesson in the episode but only 32% of first graders and 46% of third graders correctly articulated what it was.

Along similar lines, Mares (2006) showed 72 six- to nine-year-olds the Disney animated film, The Sword in the Stone and asked them whether they thought there was a lesson in the film. As in Rosenkoetter's (1999) study, most children (79%) said that they thought there was indeed a lesson. Of these, 14% said they could not say what it was, 32% repeated some part of the story (e.g., “There was this sword in this stone, and this boy, he pulled it out”), and 53% gave a general moral principle that was not related specifically to the story (“You have to be nice to people.”). Only one child gave something approximating the lesson as identified by a separate group of 30 adults (about the importance of intellect and education over physical strength). He had seen the film multiple times.

Children's difficulty in extracting the moral lesson from The Sword in the Stone (even when viewers had seen the film before) is not surprising given the complexity of the task involved, hence the cognitive resources required. The lesson had to be extracted from snippets of song and fragments of dialogue (“Use your head, boy!”) and there were no visual primes of the intended lesson. Arthur was shown flying through the air or swimming like a fish to escape various predators; although Merlin had lots of books, he and Arthur seldom consulted them. Thus it is unsurprising that children were unable to articulate the relatively unfamiliar lesson, and it is unlikely that watching the film would have prompted children to pause and engage in thoughtful (rather than physical) responses to social dilemmas.

How are Prosocial Lessons Taught in Television Content?

How do television producers go about trying to encourage and teach children to be friendly, cooperative, and inclusive? Smith et al. (2006) examined the frequency and context of altruistic acts on US television in 2005. They noted that there were approximately four instances of helping or sharing per hour in children's cable programming and close to three per hour in public broadcasting programming (of which a high proportion is children's content). Roughly half of all altruistic acts in children's cable or public broadcast programs were initiated and received by human characters – the rest were performed or received by animals or other anthropomorphic characters. Half or slightly less than half were in realistic contexts, and a number involved humor (21% in public broadcasting, 43% in children's cable).

We noticed similar patterns in our much smaller examination of television stations' descriptions to the FCC of their educational programming (Mares & Acosta, 2008). We found 12 children's programs that were purportedly teaching inclusiveness or tolerance of social differences. Most of them were targeted to children aged 8 and younger, and most were at least partly animated (10 out of 12, 83%) and contained anthropomorphic major characters such as cats, dogs, or dragons (11 out of 12, 92%). Moreover, examination of episode descriptions on TV.com suggested that tolerance was often taught by depicting one nonhuman character (e.g., a caterpillar) initially expressing prejudice or hostility toward another nonhuman character (e.g., a spider) and then learning, over the course of the episode, to be more inclusive.

Consider, for example, the following storylines. In an episode of Rolie Polie Olie, the main character (who lives on a planet where everything is round) is disturbed by the idea of playing with someone with a square head. In an episode of The Berenstain Bears, Papa Bear is bothered by the fact that a different species of bear has moved in next door. In Miss Spider's Neighborhood, Miss Spider faces hostility from other bugs that do not like spiders. In an episode of Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, a dog is teased for wanting to play with cats and engage in cat-like activities. In each case, the story ends with the character learning the error of his or her ways – but the happy ending is often relatively brief compared to the long build-up of initial discomfort.

There are two key features of these scenarios. First, they are not realistic which, given the prior research on children's difficulty with fables suggests that they may be challenging for young viewers to decode. It seems unclear that a child would reflect that just as a dog can play with a cat, so too can a girl play with a boy or a Chinese child play with an African American child. Second, and probably more importantly, much of each story is focused on negative rather than positive emotions and behaviors.

The Risks in Modeling Negative Attitudes and Behaviors

A handful of studies point to the risks of trying to teach prosocial behaviors by depicting an initial conflict or antisocial behavior. In fact, the results of our meta-analysis suggested that the negative effects of such depictions on children's interactions tend to be even stronger than “unadulterated” antisocial content, perhaps because the context of a prosocial program suggests that the initially hostile behavior being modeled is appropriate.

In an early study, Silverman and Sprafkin (1980) had 3- to 7-year-olds watch a 16-minute Sesame Street segment featuring either friendly, conflict-free interactions, or conflicts that were resolved peacefully. Pairs of children then played a marble game designed to measure cooperation: they could maximize the number of marbles they both got by taking turns, or they could ruin each other's chances by working against each other. Silverman and Sprafkin found that the prosocial-only condition had virtually no effects on cooperation in the marble game relative to a control group. However, those who saw the conflict-plus-peaceful-resolution actually cooperated less than did the control group. Similarly Liss, Reinhardt, and Fredriksen (1983) showed children either a non-aggressive excerpt of a Superfriends cartoon, or one in which the superheroes used aggression to teach someone not to steal. Those who saw the aggressive (though ultimately prosocial) content were subsequently less cooperative than those who saw the non-aggressive content and in a subsequent interview, they showed less comprehension of the plot and moral lesson of the episode. Most recently, Truglio, Kotler, Cohen, and Housley-Juster (2005) reported on the effects of an episode of Sesame Street in which Telly Monster fantasized about beating up another character who kept taking his triangles. Although the story ended positively, children who saw the episode gave more negative responses when asked what a child should do in a parallel situation than they had before they saw the episode. (See also Fisch, Brown, & Cohen, 2001.)

To be fair, there are instances where this storyline seems to work. In the same paper, Truglio et al. (2005) also reported on the effects of another episode in which Big Bird's pen pal, Gulliver, was briefly unwilling to play with anyone who was not a bird. After being confronted by Big Bird (“If you don't want to play with my friend, then I don't want to play with you!”) he learned better. Children gave significantly more positive responses to a hypothetical exclusion scenario a week after watching the episode than they had before they saw it. Presumably the differences in outcomes of the two studies had to do with the visual salience of the initial negative behavior and the speediness of the prosocial resolution.

Children's Interpretations

To examine these issues further, we decided to examine children's interpretations of a similar story. We chose an episode of Clifford the Big Red Dog, an animated program in which Clifford and his fellow dog friends (Cleo and T-Bone) and his owner, Emily Elizabeth, face various social dilemmas together. In this particular 10-minute episode (The New Friend) the dogs met a new dog that only had three legs (KC). Although Clifford is extremely (indeed, overly) friendly and concerned to be helpful, Cleo is primarily scared. She has a short fantasy represented by “thought bubbles” that KC chases and contaminates her. She lags behind to avoid walking with KC and comments to T-bone that this was because she was afraid of catching leg-losing germs. She refuses to catch a ball that KC threw her. Overall, Cleo is fearful for 9 minutes and 38 seconds of the episode, and the positive resolution only occupies the last 1 minute and 15 seconds. Sixty-four kindergarteners (aged 5 and 6) were assigned to watch either this original version, or an edited version (of the same length) with the fear removed.

The children in our study found it difficult to identify the moral lesson even though they were at the upper end of the target age-range. In many instances, they took the story at face value, regarding it only as a tale about a three-legged dog. Moreover, the two groups of viewers differed in their inferences – those who saw the original version, compared to those who saw the fear-removed version, were more likely to say that the dogs might get sick if they played with KC, and they rated him less positively. Not surprisingly then, the more they remembered that KC wanted to be friends and the more they remembered Cleo's initial fear, the less likely they were to identify the protolerance message. However, for children who saw the fear-removed version, remembering more of the (happy) elements of the story was associated with greater probability of identifying the message about tolerance.

Although we did not measure children's interest in playing with a peer with disabilities, we could see that most children did not understand the episode in the manner intended by the producers, and their interpretations were largely inconsistent with prosocial outcomes. The question then arises how one might try to improve comprehension in order to increase the odds that there might be positive outcomes.

Strategies to Try to Increase Positive Effects

Given the argument that weak effects of prosocial content are at least partly a result of cognitive constraints on processing, the logical solution is to try to improve processing and comprehension of prosocial content by freeing up cognitive resources. The strategies outlined here all involve some variant of this approach. I present them in order of least intervention to most additional adult intervention and (not coincidentally) in order of less consistently successful to most successful in fostering prosocial outcomes of viewing.

Repeated Exposure to the Content

Given that children often watch the same material repeatedly (Mares, 1998), one possibility is that with repetition, they would come to understand the material better, including the intended prosocial lessons. The evidence for the benefits of repetition is mixed. Presumably, the effects depend on how much repetition there is, and how consistent the prosocial message.

Anderson and his colleagues conducted a series of studies in the United States of children's responses to Blue's Clues (Anderson, Bryant, Wilder, Santomero, & Williams, 2000; Crawley, Anderson, Wilder, Williams, & Santomero, 1999). Blue's Clues was designed to teach thinking skills to preschoolers by having an animated dog (Blue) interact with a human character (Steve) and the viewing audience to solve a series of puzzles. The program was remarkable for its consistently positive interactions between characters, Steve's use of direct questions to viewers (“Can you help Blue find the triangle?”) and for the fact that each episode was broadcast five times in a row (once per day each week).

Crawley et al. (1999) found that 2- to 5-year-olds' comprehension of a specific episode increased substantially over the course of five days' repetition. Although this initial study did not examine comprehension of prosocial messages (and prosocial interactions were not explicitly taught), Anderson et al. (2000) also conducted a two-year longitudinal study of 120 2- to 5-year-olds in which one of the measures included caregivers' repeated assessments of the child's social behaviors (e.g., helping others). Initially none of the children in the study had access to the program; subsequently, children who had access and watched regularly were compared with those who did not have access. The majority of changes over time occurred in cognitive domains, particularly those explicitly taught by the characters. However, the ongoing, repeated modeling of friendly, positive interactions also appeared to have small, positive effects on children's social interactions. By the end of the second year, caregiver ratings of prosocial behaviors were 9% higher for regular viewers of Blue's Clues than for non-viewers.

Other studies, with fewer repetitions and less accumulation of prosocial modeling, found weaker effects. Persson and Musher-Eizenman (2003) compared the effects of showing European-American preschoolers 10 minutes of prodiversity television programming that either featured animated humans, puppets that resembled humans, or live humans. None of the conditions reduced children's preferences for photographs of Caucasians rather than photographs of Blacks and Asians or their preferences for “White” Fisher-Price Little People dolls rather than Black and Asian Little People Dolls. In a second study reported in the same paper, children watched the same episode four times over 12 days. Although children who saw the episode repeatedly understood some of the basic elements of the plot slightly better, their preferences did not change.

In the study of The Sword in the Stone (Mares, 2006), I compared the comprehension levels of children who saw the film for the first time in the study, with those who had seen it multiple times before. Even those who had seen it several times before found it difficult to make inferences about connections between events that occurred at very different points in the film and (as noted earlier) only one child could articulate the moral lesson. Thus, repetition is helpful, but it may not ensure comprehension (let alone effects) of fairly complicated narratives.

Adding Explanatory Inserts to Prosocial Content

Given the above, another alternative would be to try to make narratives simpler, not by changing the story, but by adding elements that would help draw attention to the most important events and/or that would explain the thematic connections. Again, the idea is to reduce the cognitive load required to process the information, thereby improving comprehension and ultimately improving effects.

Prior studies have found mixed effects of inserting content within episodes to try to increase children's comprehension. One of the first such projects examined five- and nine-year-olds' comprehension of an episode of the prosocial cartoon, Fat Albert. The researchers (Watkins, Calvert, Huston-Stein, & Wright, 1980) compared the effects of inserting short pauses after the key events (presumably allowing children time to process the information more fully) versus inserting short audio inserts that explained the otherwise implicit connections of events to the overall prosocial theme. Neither strategy produced significantly more comprehension than an unmodified version of the episode. A second study did find positive effects of audio-only inserts on comprehension of implicit content (Calvert, Huston, & Wright, 1987), but found that audiovisual previews of the plot only increased picture-sequencing scores (not comprehension of implicit content). A third study reported that sound effects directing children's attention to key points were associated with increased implicit comprehension, but visual inserts depicting whether the main character was dreaming or awake were associated with decreased implicit comprehension (Calvert & Gersh, 1987). Neuman, Burden, and Holden (1990) studied the effects of an audiovisual preview that summarized a televised story up to the climax and ended with a statement to help children predict how the story might end. The preview helped children remember the central events and resolution but did not help them with implicit content.

None of these studies examined the attitudinal or behavioral effects of explicitly previewing the moral lesson of a story or of inserting evaluative comments about characters' behaviors. Thus we decided to build on the prior research by examining whether audiovisual inserts that summarized the moral lesson and negatively evaluated the initial conflict could increase children's comprehension of the overarching protolerance message and thereby foster positive attitudes and judgments related to inclusiveness (Mares & Acosta, 2010).

A total of 128 4- to 6-year-olds were randomly assigned to watch one of two animated TV episodes (from Arthur or Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat) depicting initial hostility followed by friendliness (either with or without inserts), or to watch a control episode unrelated to tolerance. One insert at the beginning of the episode explicitly stated the moral lesson and its connection to the viewer's life; the second insert commented negatively on the main character's initial hostility. The hypothesis was that these inserted segments would provide scaffolding for young viewers, allowing them to understand the story better than they would without help.

The episode of Arthur (featuring a very human-looking aardvark) focused on conflict between boys and girls at a sleepaway camp, which was ultimately resolved by working together to beat rivals from another camp. The episode of Sagwa focused on a Siamese cat who was ridiculed for her friendship with mice, and as a result, initially avoided the mice until she learned better. After watching one of these two episodes (either with or without the inserts) or the control episode, children were asked to indicate which of a variety of diverse hypothetical classmates they would like to have in class and to evaluate an exclusion scenario.

Children who saw the cat-mouse episode with inserts showed significantly more prosocial reasoning about gender-based exclusion than the control group; those who saw it without inserts did not differ from the control group. Those who saw the boy-girl episode without inserts showed significantly less prosocial reasoning than the control group and were significantly less likely to show gender balance in their choice of hypothetical classmates; those who saw it with the inserts did not differ significantly from the control group. Thus the inserts seemed to enhance the positive effects of the cat–mouse episode and mitigate the negative effects of the boy–girl episode on gender-related judgments. Moreover, our argument that children's interpretations of the content play a key role in explaining the effects of exposure was supported by mediation analyses – controlling for children's evaluations of the initial hostility in the episode and their understanding of the intended moral lesson provided partial mediation of the effects of viewing condition on their classmate choices and moral reasoning about exclusion.

Overall, the set of studies suggest that comprehension (or the lack thereof) is indeed part of the reason why prosocial episodes are sometimes ineffective when watched without additional help. However, inserts of sound effects or explanations do not consistently foster improved outcomes.

Couldn't Parents Explain?

Research on “scaffolding” suggests that comments and questions by adults can help children master a task that is within their developmental range of competence but would be slightly too difficult without assistance (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976; Wood & Middleton, 1975). One obvious possibility is that if parents want their young children to learn socioemotional lessons from television, they could coview, ask questions and, if needed, point out the moral lessons. Several studies (e.g., Clarke-Stewart & Beck, 1999; Collins, Sobol, & Westby, 1981) found that children were better able to remember the events of the story or make inferences connecting events, if they watched with an adult who made comments, asked questions, and corrected misinterpretations about the program. Similarly, Watkins et al. (1980) found that having an adult coview the episode of Fat Albert, pause it at key points and explain the importance of a particular event and how it related to earlier events (both temporally and thematically) created significantly higher comprehension. Remarkably, the points at which the adult paused the tape and the comments made were identical to those in the unsuccessful audiovisual inserts group described earlier.

Other research suggests that having adults make evaluative comments about television characters' actions can help diminish negative effects (Nathanson, 2004; Nathanson, Wilson, & McGee, 2002) and enhance positive effects of viewing (Abelman, 1991). However, survey research (Rideout & Hamel, 2006) suggests that parents typically do not watch television with their children and instead report using the time when their children are watching to get other things done. Thus although this seems a potentially fruitful approach, it does not appear likely to happen with great regularity.

Activities that Elaborate on Prosocial TV Exposure

The final, most labor-intensive possibility is that prosocial television content can be accompanied by related activities and classroom discussion, elaborating on the prosocial themes. In general, the research suggests that positive effects are stronger under these conditions.

Readers will recall the Friedrich and Stein study (1973) of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood described earlier in which there were no significant effects of viewing the program at home. In contrast, there were significant changes in the subset of children who then watched 12 episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood over four weeks in preschool, accompanied by related activities. They persisted longer at tasks, were more likely to obey rules, and were more likely to delay gratification without protest, than those who watched other programs. Moreover, among children from families with lower socioeconomic status, those assigned to watch Mister Rogers' Neighborhood showed more cooperation and friendliness in playground interactions, though these effects gradually declined throughout the two-week post-exposure period.

In a second study, Friedrich and Stein (1975) assigned 75 kindergarten children to either a control condition or to watch four episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and receive one of two types of training: verbal labeling (children were taught to describe how characters had felt and behaved) or role-playing (children used hand puppets to reenact scenes from the episodes). Over the next few days, the children had opportunities to engage in helping behaviors, either related to the program (helping a puppet from the program during a reenactment of one of the scenes) or in unrelated contexts (helping fix a torn collage). There were slightly higher levels of helping behaviors among the children who had watched Mister Rogers than among those in the control group. For boys, however, the effects varied by type of training. Role-play training strengthened the effects of the program, but verbal labeling was associated with some decreases in helping relative to the control group. Girls, by contrast, learned the content best in the verbal labeling condition.

In their third study, Friedrich-Cofer, Huston-Stein, Kipnis, Susman, and Clewett (1979) compared the effects of (1) 20 episodes of Mister Rogers over eight weeks without any additional prosocial materials; (2) 20 episodes of Mister Rogers and access to prosocial books and games; (3) 20 episodes of Mister Rogers, access to prosocial materials, and follow-up activities such as verbal labeling of emotions and role playing, and (4) neutral films. The researchers found that Mister Rogers' Neighborhood alone produced relatively few behavioral changes. Children in the second group (viewing plus materials) displayed more positive and more negative behaviors. Only children in the third group (viewing and materials and activities) displayed more positive behaviors without any increases in aggression.

A similar finding emerged from Johnston and Ettema's (1985) vast field experiment with 7,000 fourth- through sixth graders across the United States, examining the effects of Freestyle (a US public television program designed to reduce stereotypes about gender roles in school). When the 26 quarter-hour episodes were watched in class and followed by teacher-led discussions of the issues raised, the students showed substantial changes in their gender-related beliefs and most effects were significant even nine months later. However, when the programs were viewed in a classroom with no follow-up discussion, there were many fewer significant effects. Among those who only watched at home, the few significant effects were limited to the heaviest viewers.

Overall then, a number of studies established that it was possible to use television programming in school to produce positive and relatively enduring changes in children's behaviors. Moreover, the effects were strongest among children from low-SES backgrounds who initially behaved less positively in school interactions. However, these positive changes primarily occurred in the context of extra material and rehearsal of the program lessons.

Conclusions

Although I do not lightly brush aside the ethical concerns raised about manipulating children, I would argue that it is indeed a prosocial outcome to have children interacting in friendly, inclusive ways. The research reviewed here suggests that there can be significant and important positive changes in children's social attitudes and behaviors as a result of media exposure.

However, the findings also indicate that it is often unrealistic to expect television content to have such effects on its own, given the cognitive work involved in extracting moral themes from stories. Moreover, when the stories adults produce for children contain mixed messages (lingering on hostile or fearful interactions rather than focusing on positive emotions), the outcomes of viewing tend to be less than prosocial.

The implication, explored here, is that improving children's comprehension of the intended point of a prosocial narrative is one path to improving the outcomes of exposure. Unfortunately, the research does not suggest that there is a quick and easy path to improved comprehension, though increasing the focus on visually salient demonstrations of positive feelings and behaviors seems a good start. Active adult mediation of the content, whether at the time of viewing or via subsequent discussions, labeling, and related activities appears, thus far, to be the best route toward positive effects of viewing. Thus far, the research on substituting adult mediation with audiovisual inserts finds only mixed benefits.

Given the FCC mandate for educational/informative programming and the genuine desire of producers and educators and parents to have at least a portion of children's viewing be socially beneficial, it seems wasteful not to work further to refine our understanding of what is involved in promoting values that we agree, as a society, our children should learn.

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