SAN FRANCISCO - While much of the concern surrounding media violence and its effect on children has emphasized the role of movies, television, video games, and music lyrics, new research indicates that violence on television news is the cause of significant fear and rumination in children. Two psychologists who have researched the effects of TV news violence on children, and a third psychologist who led the crisis response teams at the Arkansas and Kentucky school shootings, will discuss how television news violence instills fear in children.

WHAT: News Briefing: Television News' Coverage of Violence: Instilling Fear in Children?

WHEN: Monday August 17, 1998 at 10:30 AM

WHERE: The Palace Hotel, Napa Room, San Francisco, CA

PARTICIPANTS:

Joanne Cantor, Ph.D., is a Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is an internationally recognized expert on children and the mass media. Her research over the past 15 years has focused primarily on the effects of television on children, in particular the types of mass media images and events that frighten children at different ages and the intervention and coping strategies that are most effective for different age groups. She has worked with the national PTA on projects related to the V-chip, and her finding that parents wanted content information rather than age recommendations helped bring together a national coalition of child advocacy groups to oppose the industry's age-based ratings and lobby for more informative ratings. As a result of her research on the V-chip as a senior researcher for the National Television Violence Study, she has testified before committees of both the U.S. House and Senate and helped convince the television industry to add content information to its age-based system. Dr. Cantor is a consultant and researcher on children's programming for Wisconsin Public Television, and her book Mommy I'm Scared: How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them will be published by Harvest Books in September 1998. Dr. Cantor is also on the editorial boards of Communication Research and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.

Barbara Wilson, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her area of expertise is the social and psychological effects of the mass media, in particular children's emotional and cognitive processing and developmental differences in children's responses to mass media. Along with her colleagues at UC, Santa Barbara, she has just completed a $3.5 million project funded by the National Cable Television Association to assess violence on television. Dr. Wilson has served as a research consultant for Nickelodeon, the National Association of Television Program Executives and Discovery Channel Pictures. She is currently principal investigator on a Court TV project to assess the impact of anti-violence curriculum in middle schools. She is currently on the editorial boards of Communication Reports, Media Psychology, and the Journal of Communication.

Scott Poland, Ed.D., is Director of Psychological Services for the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District of 56,000 students in Houston, Texas. He is a two-time winner of the Texas' Most Outstanding School Psychologist Award and has received the Excellence in School Psychological Services Award. A nationally recognized expert on school crisis, he served as a team leader on and spokesman for national crisis teams sent to Paducah, KY and Jonesboro, AR in the wake of school shootings. He is currently the Chairman of the National Association of School Psychologists' National Emergency Assistance Team. Dr. Poland was one of two educators invited to the White House in May 1998 to discuss solutions to youth violence with President Clinton, Attorney General Reno, and Secretary of Education Riley. He also testified before Congress this year on the issue of youth violence.

The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA's membership includes more than 155,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 50 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 59 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare.