TV: It Can Leave You Tense and Passive, Studies Find

Television is by far the most popular of all American pastimes, but it is also more likely than any other leisure activity to leave people passive, tense and unable to concentrate, according to a major new set of studies to be released Monday.

Supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Spencer Foundation and other private nonprofit organizations, the studies show that it takes more skill and concentration to eat than it does to watch television. And, while people assume that television offers relaxation and escape from the worries and tensions of everyday life, sitting in front of a TV set, especially for long periods of time, actually leaves people in worse moods than they were before they began to watch.

The research also found that while television does have, as many experts have long held, a negative impact on the quality of family life, it does have the unexpected benefit of encouraging families to spend time together.

Literally thousands of books and articles have been written during the last two decades on the effects of television on modern society. But this project, which involved 1,200 subjects in nine studies over 13 years, is one of the first and certainly the most comprehensive attempt to understand what actually happens to people before, during and after watching television in their homes, said Howard Gardner, a psychologist at Harvard University.

The results of the studies are described in a book titled “Television and the Quality of Life: How Viewing Shapes Everyday Experience.” It was written by psychologists Robert Kubey of Rutgers University and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago. The results of the studies are scheduled to be released at a press conference at Rutgers in New Brunswick, N.J.

Television has been blamed for many of the current ills of society, “ranging from poor language and reading skills in children and declining SAT scores in adolescents to apathy and marital difficulty in adults,” Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi said.

Yet, in some ways, Kubey said, television does precisely what people think they want it to do. As comedy writer and producer Stu Silverman recently put it: “Television reassures us, it’s ‘nice,’ it doesn’t offend or challenge an audience. It’s designed to do the opposite of art, to reassure rather than excite. That often is what people want.”

Or as Steven Bochco, creator of “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law,” once said in an interview in Playboy magazine: What television viewers seem to want is to be left “in a pleasant state of semiconsciousness” before going to bed.

Is this the case? Is television as benign and soothing as its defenders contend? Or as harmful as its critics charge?

To address these and other unanswered questions about the effects of television on everyday life, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi designed an unusual--but, many social scientists now believe, a highly effective--way of assessing viewing patterns and the impact they have on people’s moods.

Rather than place research subjects in unnatural laboratory settings or ask them to try to recall past experiences or attempt to explain their behavior, the researchers selected subjects, ranging in age from 10 to 82, and asked them to go about their daily activities as they ordinarily would. The only requirement was that they carry pocket-sized electronic paging devices and booklets of self-report forms in which they recorded their activities and moods every time the beepers were activated, which happened at random intervals throughout the day and night.

“Basically,” Csikszentmihalyi said, “we collected a series of snapshots of what people were doing and how they felt at the time. . . . We were thus able to map moods and patterns of behavior that may have eluded the subjects themselves.”

What the researchers confirmed was that the average American seems irresistibly drawn to the TV set.

Roughly 90% of the time, people were watching television because they wanted to do so, compared to work, which people did willingly and happily only 15% of the time.

On average, according to Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi’s estimates, Americans spend nearly half of their leisure time watching television--an average of roughly two hours a day or the equivalent of 7 years over the course of a lifetime.

“More Americans now have television sets than have refrigerators or indoor plumbing, and the medium has clearly become an American institution, substantially altering and influencing every other institution and ranking with the family, the school, and the church as contemporary culture’s prime forces of socialization,” the authors wrote.

Typically, the researchers found, Americans watch television whenever they have the time to do so, rather than because they want to watch a particular program. Moreover, they seem to want their programs to be familiar and predictable, rather than unusual and stimulating.

Television, Csikszentmihalyi said, is a way for people to organize their lives--to make sense out of confusion, to alleviate frustration and to put in order those hours of their lives when there is no structure or demands placed on them.

Nearly two-thirds of the time, people are doing something else while watching television, the researchers found. In most cases, they are either talking or eating. In some cases, they are grooming themselves, doing chores, reading, cleaning or taking care of children.

Men, on average, watch slightly more television than women, largely because women spend more time preparing food, cleaning the house, doing laundry and caring for children. As a group, blacks also tend to watch more TV than do whites or Latinos.

Moreover, cross-national comparisons of television viewing in Italy, Canada and Germany showed that television is experienced in much the same way from one society to the next.

Education does not seem to make much difference in how much TV people watch, although it does make a difference in how people feel about watching TV.

The more educated people are, the researchers found, the more likely they are to wish that they were doing something besides watching TV. This apparent “guilt” about watching television has been reflected in other studies, not only in the United States but in England and Japan as well, where well-educated and affluent groups express “snobbish” attitudes about “partaking in mass culture” and being a party to television’s “low-brow mass appeal,” Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi said.

No matter who they are, when people sit down to watch TV, particularly for long periods of time, they tend to be in low moods, the researchers found. Moreover, the longer they watch, the less able they are to concentrate. They become increasingly drowsy and bored. As time goes on, they grow sadder, lonelier, more irritable and more hostile. Although it is true people are relaxed while the television set is on, when they turn it off, they are even less relaxed than before they began to watch, the researchers said.

That is not true of sports or other pastimes. Although it takes a good more exertion and concentration to read than it does to watch TV, for example, people reported feeling even more relaxed after reading a book than they do after watching TV. And, after reading, they are also in better moods and much more able to concentrate than they are after a session in front of the television set.

“These facts are particularly important,” the researchers contend, “because they tell us that a person need not reduce concentration and feel passive in order to experience relaxation.”

Much like a drug that makes people feel better while they are doing it but worse afterward, television is a readily available and inexpensive way for people to escape from the worries and complexities of modern day life. But it is ultimately not a very satisfying way to spend time and it certainly is not as relaxing as everyone seems to think it is, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi said.

“Certainly it can be argued that using television in this manner habitually is no worse, and may indeed be better, than habitually using alcohol or other mood-altering substances,” they said.

Yet, they added, “Just as a drug masks pain but does not heal, may be of limited value in the long run, or may cause addiction, so can viewing encourage a false sense of well-being in some people who might be better off taking active steps to change the conditions of their ‘real’ life.”

Despite the negative effects television viewing seems to have on individuals, the researchers did not find that television was necessarily detrimental to family life, as many critics have argued.

This has been one of the “long-standing, unresolved controversies” in mass communication research, said Kubey. While some experts contend that the TV set is as unthreatening as any other piece of furniture in the house, others have blamed it for all that ails modern American families.

In fact, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi said, TV viewing--even evening viewing--”was not shown to be the uniformly negative phenomenon vis-a-vis the family that some have suggested.”

In many ways, television watching “harmonizes with family life,” the researchers found. The more people watch television, for example, the more likely they are to spend time together as a family. In contrast, the more teen-agers listen to music, the less likely they are to spend time with their families.

Frequent TV viewing by older adolescents also correlated positively with how much time youngesters spent in the classroom and how well they did in school.

One explanation for these surprising findings may be that much of the content of American television is itself supportive of mainstream, conventional values, the researchers said. In other words, those people who are attracted to TV and its “conventional perspective of the world” are themselves people who believe in the virtues of “basic institutions such as family, church and school, and values such as honesty, hard work and self-advancement.”

Watching television is also by far the easiest way for people of different ages to spend time together. But when families watch television as opposed to doing other activities as a group, they are significantly less alert, less active and less challenged, the researchers said.

“Ultimately,” the researchers wrote, “the evidence on whether the medium might disrupt family life is mixed. On the one hand, heavier use of television was associated with somewhat more positive familial experiences for most of the respondents in three separate studies. On the other hand, families that spend a lot of time watching television together spend relatively more time passively with one another.”

One solution, the researchers contend, is for families and schools to educate youngsters about the art of television watching.

“One may scoff at training people to become better television viewers, but a public well-educated in the nuances and methods of the visual media will both demand better quality, and be less readily manipulated by them,” Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi concluded.

“Indeed, if most children are going to continue to watch 1,000 hours of television every year of their young lives and 1,000 hours every year for the rest of their lives, it is absurd for them not to receive formal education in the medium. No one thinks twice about instructing children in how to read a novel, a poem, or an essay, but in point of fact, the amount of time most people will spend reading these forms relative to the amount of time they will spend watching television would boggle the mind.”