Timesonline.co.uk | Lure of television is stronger than a smile

by David Lister, Scotland Correspondent
'[...] In a study that raises disturbing questions about the ability of a generation of children to interact with others, psychologists discovered that children aged 6 to 8 respond to the image of a television as alcoholics do to pictures of drink.
In a series of experiments conducted in primary schools, most looked at a picture of a blank television screen as soon as it flashed up on a computer next to a smiling face.
Markus Bindemann, a researcher in psychology at the University of Glasgow and co-author of Television at Face Value: Children’s Behaviour in Attention-Cueing Tasks, described the results as worrying. [...]
According to recent research, the average British child aged 4 to 6 watches about 16 hours of television a week. By their teens, four out of five have a television in their bedroom. Kevin Browne, Professor of Forensic and Family Psychology at the University of Birmingham, said that the study raised questions about whether parents were using television and computers as a cheap way of entertaining their children: “How a child has been socialised in the first few years of life will seriously affect whether he or she engages with people or engages with a television screen.” He cautioned that there may be other reasons why children favour the television screen, including an “anticipation” about what they think they might see on it.'

The Times November 07, 2006