PSYC 2110 Chapter Notes - Chapter 17: Absenteeism
15 Nov 2016
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Extrafamilial influences - social agencies other than the family that influence a child"s or an adolescent"s cognitive, social, and emotional development. Although children spend more time watching tv than in any other waking activity, tv viewing, in moderate doses is unlikely to impair their cognitive growth, academic achievement, or peer relations. Tv literacy - a person"s ability to understand how information is conveyed in television programming and to interpret this information properly. Cognitive development and experience watching tv leads to increases in tv literacy during middle childhood and adolescence. Tv violence can instigate aggressive behaviour, cultivate aggressive habits and mean-world beliefs, and desensitize children to aggression. Mean-world beliefs - a belief, fostered by televised violence, that the world is a more dangerous and frightening place than is actually the case. Desensitization hypothesis - the notion that people who watch a lot of media violence will become less aroused by aggression and more tolerant of violent and aggressive acts.
