CHILDRENS COGNITIVE AND EMOTIONAL RESPONSES TO THE PORTRAYAL OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN FAMILY-FORMATTED SITUATION COMEDIES

This experiment assesses children's cognitive and emotional responses to negative emotions in family-formatted situation comedies. Boys and girls from two grade levels (Grades K-2 os. Grades 3-5) viewed a famil y sitcom that featured one of two negative emotions (anger,fear) and v aried the inclusion of a positive, humorous sub plot (no, yes). Result s revealed that inclusion of the subplot reduced comprehension of the major story line for younger children as well as for boys. Among all c hildren, the presence of the positive subplot also distorted perceptio ns of how negative and persistent the main character's emotions were. Finally, children who perceived the family sitcom to be highly realist ic were more concerned about similar negative emotional events in thei r own lives than were those who perceived the program to be less reali stic. The findings are discussed in terms of children's social learnin g from television and emotional development.