Screen Media + Social Development Sarah Adams Fall 2015

Screen Media is EVERYWHERE Studies have shown that 73% of teens use social media Also that 93% of all teens use the internet in general

Social Development Research Question: How can screen media use affect the development of social skills? For this question, I addressed the positive and negative effects associated with screen media on social development

Positives of Screen Media Improved Social Interaction practice Emotional Recognition Example: Viewing characters interacting with one another can be used to produce imitation

Positives cont. Example: Bogatz and Ball studied impact of Sesame Street and found positive influence on emotion recognition Strengths: a pretest and post test to see effect Weaknesses: questionable reliability of parent report of television viewing AND not generalizable because of Low SES participants

Positives Prosocial Behavior Christakis et al. (2013): Compared violent media to prosocial media and showed that child behavior improved with prosocial tv viewing compared to violent tv viewing. Strengths: same viewing time for both groups Weakness: short term viewing, would benefit from longitudinal design

Negatives: Recognition of Emotions Uhls et al. did a study and showed that children who were prevented from screen media improved recognition of nonverbal emotional cues. Strength: good use of pre and post test to see effect Weakness of the study: not fair comparison of environments

Uhls et al. Results Graphs show the improvement between pre tests and pos tests Control group: improved 1.79 questions Experimental group: improved 4.76 questions

Negatives Aggressive Behavior by imitating content Study showed that children who watched Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers exhibited more violent behaviors than before they had viewed the show Strength: shows pre and post effect Weakness: only one trial, would benefit from long term study

Power Rangers Example of violent content

Conclusion: Content is to blame By looking at positive and negative effects of the screen media on social development, we see that the content of screen media plays a large role Prosocial content can lead to positive social development while violent content can lead to negative impacts on social development.

Implications Prosocial viewing content can have positive influences by viewing successful social interactions and mimicking Violent content can have negative and can lead to anxiety and depression later in life. These findings will lead to parents increasing prosocial screen media and limiting violent content media to assist social development

Future Directions Future studies can conduct longitudinal studies on the effect viewing certain content can have on child social development A pre and post test assessment and the incorporation of different content types will be necessary for comparison