MORE EMPATHY SOUGHT IN TV SHOWS FOR YOUTH

“Frequent exposure to the depiction of aggression on television is a significant cause of aggressive behavior in children.”

So said a UCLA psychology professor Tuesday, acknowledging prevailing national research and reinforcing the bleak picture of television and its impact on the nation’s youth being painted at a conference on “Children and the Media” at the Ambassador Hotel.

While Seymour Feshbach allowed that he personally believes “the issue remains open,” he reported that “evidence is sufficiently compelling to warrant” reduction of violence on TV and increasing other program choices for children, including portrayal of empathetic characters--those who are “sensitive to the feelings of others.”

“We need to portray the affection/caring/dimensions of our heroes and heroines,” he told the 250 entertainers, broadcast executives, psychiatrists, psychologists and educators gathered for the second day of the three-day conference.

Asked what characters on TV now reflected such empathy, Feshbach paused, then said, “the captain on ‘Hill Street Blues’.” But, “unfortunately,” he said that program is becoming “increasingly violent.”

Feshbach, who offered an overview of contemporary research on TV’s effect on youth, said that researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have found that “aggressive children seek out aggressive TV and aggressive TV reinforces aggressive behavior.”

“Censorship is not the answer,” said Susan Stuart Kaplan, director of community education for Action for Children’s Television, in a luncheon address. Instead, Kaplan said, parents should use the “off button more often.”

Noting that children on the average watch 25-30 hours per week, or about four hours a day, she said they are “learning some strange lessons from that TV screen: peculiar driving habits from ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ . . . the idea that sugar is the most important food you can eat . . . and from cable they are learning about sex with violence before they experience sex with love.”

Kaplan, the mother of two teen-agers, added: “Even a little censorship is a dangerous threat to free speech. Conservative groups want to censor pornography and obscenity. Liberals want to censor violence. Women’s groups want to censor pornography against women. . . . ACT believes that these well-meaning efforts are not significantly different from the recent successful action in a small town in Florida to ban ‘Catcher in the Rye’ from the library shelves,” she said.

Besides using the off button, Kaplan added, “Parents have to learn to act as mediators between their children and the television screen.”

Children simply watch television too much, Feshbach said, noting that, for many, television exposure “constitutes more time than the child spends in school.”

While pre-schoolers between 2 and 5 watch 29 hours of TV a week on the average, he said, their elementary school counterparts between 6 and 11 watch an average of 27 hours a week.

“This, I will argue, is, in itself, a demographic fact of enormous importance,” Feshbach noted.

But he pointed out that since that figure was an average, “hundreds of thousands of children in these age groups are watching 30 and more hours a week.”

Feshbach said that his own research and that of a colleague shows that the average white 10-year-old in Los Angeles watches 26 hours a week and the average black 10-year-old watches close to 40 hours a week.

Children from lower socio-economic backgrounds watch more TV than children from more affluent families, he said. Children who are more depressed and have severe family conflicts also watch TV more than healthier children, he said. He noted, however, that the data is not conclusive regarding which is the causal factor.

L. Rowell Huesmann, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the researchers whose work Feshbach cited, described a 22-year research project that he and a colleague conducted from 1960-1982 studying students in Columbia County in New York State from the eighth grade to age 30. He said there is “a correlation between preferences for violent TV at age 8 and the incidence of criminal behavior at age 30.”

Although he emphasized that “more aggressive children watch more violence on TV,” Huesmann maintained that it is not a chicken-or-egg phenomenon but “a continuous cycle . . . and a constant interface.”