Media studies

Put forward the absorbtion and addiction model. It argues that people pursue parasocial relationships due to deficits or lacks within their real life.

Used UK students(126 male and 181 females) and had them complete a CAS (celebrity attitude scale) and a general health questionnaire (GHQ28) which measured depression, anxiety and social dysfunction. It was found that the higher the score on the GHQ the higher the score on the CAS, which suggests hat the attraction of celebrity is due to personal issues.

Carried out a telephone survey of 833 Chinese teenagers and found that idol worships(idols mainly being pop music and athletic celebrities) predicted lower work/study performance, lower self esteem and lower identity achievement. Those who had greater exposure to their idols(via television and radio) showed the lowest levels of identity achievement.

Suggests we regard media characteristics as being members of social group due to celebrities being relatively recent(evolutionary speaking) thus the media coverage on celebrities trigger the same gossip mechanisms that have evolved to keep up with the affairs of in group members.

Suggests that gossiping serves a similar function to social grooming in primates, it allows alliances to be made but in a much quicker way.

Showed in a laboratory that when individuals are called upon to judge behaviour of gossipers in different gossip scenarios, gossipers who used their tales to undermine someone and to serve selfish purposes were judged very negatively while gossiping with the aim of reinforcing the groups rules and policing deviance was seen in a neutral light.
This is assumed to be because via effective self control it allows the group to develop in an adaptive way, with gossip supporting this.

Fox used focus groups and surveys to look at mobile phone use in relation to gossip. It was found that the subjects of gossip are the same whether out are male or female, with both gossiping on their mobiles about members of their social network, family, friends and colleagues. Most respondents said that they gossiped about everyone. Very few admitted t gossiping primarily about celebrities, but focus group discussions indicate that gossip about celebrities does form a significant part of some peoples mobile chat. Particularly during important events such as murder mysteries in soap operas and crises among participants in reality TV programmes.

Surveyed 600 participants using maltbys 3 dimension of celebrity worship and found that 20% fell into the first category and followed celebrities for entertainment and value. Another 10% fell into the second category feeling they had a special bond with the celebrity and less than 1% were considered borderline pathological

Used CAS to est whether there is a link between celebrity worship and poor bod image. They surveyed 229 adolescents, 183 university students and 289 adults using the CAS and assessments of body image. They found a string association between intense personal celebrity worship and body image but only in female adolescents. It seems that some adolescent females have particularly strong parasocial relationships with media figures whose body shape they admire. The relationship between celebrity worship and body image seems to disappear in early adulthood.

Investigated whether childhood insecure attachment is associated with attachment to celebrities and tendency to celebrity stalking. They used 299 students aged 16-42 and measured childhood attachment, the tendency to condone celerity stalking. Those with insecure attachment were more likely to think stalking was acceptable.

Studied 275 stalkers of the British Royal family and found that 83.6% had some psychotic illness. 18% showed delusions of identity(thinking they were related) and 12% sought some intimacy/were infatuated.

Looked at the role of fear in message content. Studied female university students who were randomly allocated to one of three conditions relating to self breast examination.
The loss condition emphasised the dangers of failing to self examine
The gain condition emphasised the positives on self examination such as early detection and treatment
The neutral control condition gave basic facts about breast cancer.
The students were reinterviewed after 4 months and asked about their attitude to self examination and how often they had carried it out. The loss group who had been exposed to the most fear were the only group to change their behaviour and their attitude towards self examination.

Found credible sources were effective at influencing an audience even when there was a significant discrepancy between what the audience already beloved and the arguments contained the message.
It also found that if a non expert source presented the argument that were too different to an audience existing views, the audience would resist and even look for ways to discredit the communicator.
This was not true of a credible source and in this study a supposed Nobel prize winner was able to convince the audience that one hour of sleep per night was the optimum needed.

Found that if a message arrouses too much fear then some members of the audience may be so pre-occupied with their own emotions that hey pay less attention to the content of the message

Carried out a study using 227 student smokers whose NC was assessed and they were then exposed to three conditions;
A fact based leaflet emphasising smoking risks
An emotion based leaflet emphasising risks
A control condition
It was found that those who had a high NC responded better o the fact based leaflet and those low in NC were more persuaded by the emotion based leaflet. This suggests hat those whose NC is high took time to consider the arguments where as those who had low NC took the peripheral route and were more influenced by the contextual factors.

Found that when using an attractive model as a peripheral cue in a shampoo advert that participants actually viewed the attractiveness as central evidence of the shampoos performance.

Bobo doll experiment- showed children a short film in which the model abuses and inflatable doll and is either rewarded with sweets and praised or punished by being told off or no consequences occurred. They were then shown toys they couldn't play with. When playing the children who had seen the child punished committed fewer acts than the other conditions.

Carried out a longitudinal study of 557 boys and girls in Chicago. They were first studied in 1977 when they where aged between 5-8 ad asked about their favourite programmes and television characters. The children were asked which characters they most identified with.
In 1991 398 were followed up in their early 20's. They were asked to identify 3 favourite television programmes and how often they watched them. Friends were also interviewed about the participants gressive behaviour and official records were looked at too see if they were involved in crimes.
It was found that there was a correlation between violent to watched and aggression in adults 15years later.
Those men who were high violence viewers when younger were three times more likely to have a criminal conviction than those who were low violence viewers.

Studied the island of St. Helena two years before television was introduced to the island and three years after television had been introduced. It was found that overall aggression did not increase as a result of to being introduced to the island(even though on average 95 aggressive acts were viewed on TV every day)

Argue the link between viewing aggressive TV and becoming aggressive is correlation all rather than due to cause and effect. Eg there may be a third variable affecting aggression.

6 year olds watch an episode of lassie in which there was a scene of a puppy rescue whilst other participants watched an episode with no puppy rescue. A third group watched an episode of the Brady bunch. Afterwards all the children played a game in which they came into contact with distressed puppies. Those who had viewed the lassie episode with the rescue scene spent more time trying to comfort the puppies that the other children even though it would interfere with winning.

Correlated the child's watching of sitcoms as reported by parents and the amount of helpful and prosiocial behaviour they showed and found a significant correlation.

Examined the effects that watching pro social sitcoms had on children aged between 8 and 13 living in California. Children completed a questionnaire about their normal television watching habits and were allocated to one of two conditions.
The experimental group watched a 30 minute episode of hang time and then took part in a 15minute discussion about it with an adult. The control group watched the same episode bu did not discuss it.
The study found that children in the experimental group showed improved scores over the control group in measure of pro-social behaviours including tolerance and friendship. The researchers concluded that watching and discussing with an adult is valuable in order for children to benefit from pro social programmes

Conduced 3 studies in 3 different countries with 3 age groups to test whether video games in which characters help each other increased both short term and long term prosiocial behaviour.
Findings from the USA experimental part of the study (involving 161 college students) showed that those who were randomly assigned to play pro social games behaved more helpfully towards another student in a later task than those who played violent games
In the Japanese longitudinal study which used a sample of 10-17 ear olds, pro social game playing was related to prosiocial behaviour over a three to four month period
In the correlational study, Singapore middle school students who played more pro social games behaved more pro socially

Compared heart rate and calorie expenditure in children whilst playing an active bowling game an active running game, a seated bowling game and during rest.
Compared to the resting condition; 39% more calories were burnt during the seated game, 98% more in the active bowling game and 451% more on the running game.

Claim that adolescents tend to use computers technology to nurture existing friendships. User friendly services like MySpace, Facebook and MSN have encouraged adolescents to use this technology to communicate with others and it is estimated that 88% of adolescents use instant messaging to communicate with friends.

Compared the effects of instant messaging between distressed adolescents and an un-distressed group.
Questionnaires, textual analysis and evaluations of the conversation were used to measure any effects.
It was found that IM significantly contributed to the well-being of distressed adolescents. Furthermore, participants who were introverts(as oppose to extroverts) were more likely to benefit from the effects of IM

Had 161 9-12 year old children play either violent or non violent games for 20minutes.
After this children were given another video game to play which allowed them to select the degree of punishment to deliver to an opponent(eg blast of noise)
They found that children who had played violent video games previously tended to deliver stronger punishments that those who had played a non-violent game.
The violent games used in this game were rated E for everyone and T for teen
They also found that five months later that the children who played more aggressive video games at the start of the study were more likely to have hostile feelings and aggressive behaviour when followed up(via questionnaire)

Gave out questionnaires to participants before taking part in their study, which measured their level of aggression. Several weeks later 40 participants played two violent video games; the godfather (gangster) and True crime; streets of LA(violent police officer). Both games involved the characters kicking, punching and using weapons. Some of his play was measured in content analysis.
It was found that participants with higher aggressive personality scores from the questionnaire, engaged in more frequent violence when playing games suggesting a link between the two.

Carried out a surve on 813 university students, they found that as the amount of time playing video games went up, the quality of relationships with peers and friends went down

Surveyed 169 people during the first 1-2years they got the Internet in their household. Greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in communication with family members in their house, their friendship circle and increases depression and loneliness