Pessimism and Anxiety: Effects of Tween Sitcoms on Expectations and Feelings About Peer Relationships in School

Abstract

Television programs for tweens (roughly 8–14 year olds) offer glimpses of life in high school, often depicting prototypical crowds (e.g., jocks and populars) and various forms of interpersonal hostility. Fifth graders (N = 97) were randomly assigned to watch a tween television episode that was high or low in social conflict (two exemplars at each level) and then answered questions about their future middle school and their habitual exposure to tween television programs. Consistent with predictions afforded by the General Aggression Model (Anderson & Bushman, 2002), habitual exposure was associated with expectations of encountering specific crowds in middle school (person schemata), with expectations of less friendliness and more bullying (behavioral scripts), and with greater anxiety about attending their future school. Similarly, those who saw high-conflict episodes anticipated more hostility and less friendliness in their future school and felt more anxious and less positive about going there than those who saw low-conflict episodes (effects that were partly mediated by perceptions of character hostility). There were also significant interactions between habitual and experimental exposure: Participants who did not habitually watch tween programs and who saw a high-conflict episode resembled habitual viewers in their lowered expectations of friendliness and heightened expectations of hostility.

Notes

Preparation of this manuscript was facilitated by a fellowship given to M.-L. Mares by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). We thank Lydia Armstrong, Alyson Beckman, Robert Siebert, and Bao Ta for their assistance with data collection, and Sarah Hagberg and Chloe Sedelmaier for their assistance with coding. We also thank the editor, Cynthia Hoffner, and anonymous reviewers for their extensive, helpful comments.

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1. As originally conceived, indirect aggression involved rather covert acts of social manipulation, such as spreading rumors behind someone's back (Lagerspetz, Bjorkvist, & Peltonen, 1988; Bjorkqvist, Lagerspetz, & Kaukiainen, 1992). The notion of relational aggression (Crick et al., 1999) also focused on intentional damage to the victim's social status and relationships, whether through covert, indirect activities such as spreading rumors or by more overt behaviors such as publicly ignoring someone. Social aggression (Cairns, Cairns, Neckerman, Ferguson & Gariepty, 1989; Galen & Underwood, 1997) included an even broader array of behaviors, such as direct verbal attacks, indirect manipulation, or hostile nonverbal cues such as rolling one's eyes. All three share the emphasis on inflicting harm to the victim's social standing rather than causing physical pain.

2. Two unpublished content analyses also offer clues about the depictions of teen relationships. Gerding (2011) indicated that over 80% of 30 “teen scene” programs targeted at tween audiences featured physical violence, the majority of which was presented as humorous. Scheibe and Lowery (2009) reported an average of seven acts of verbal aggression per half-hour tween and teen program in which characters exchanged slurs (e.g., loser and jerk) and insults about their intelligence, appearance, or personality. Such slurs and insults tended to co-occur with other nonphysical forms of aggression such as social isolation and gossiping.

3. The choice of which groups to count was based on: a) examples of prototypical school crowds reported in prior research (e.g., B. B. Brown, 1990; Horn, 2003), b) social crowds in high school films and television programs (e.g., Kavaney, 2006; Northup & Lieber, 2010), c) what appeared in the transcripts. Some groups, such as cheerleaders or druggies and potheads, that we anticipated encountering in the transcripts were not mentioned by any children, so were not included as part of this measure.

4. As indicated by ratings information and press releases on Nickelodeon's press site (http://biz.viacom.com/sites/nickelodeonpress/TEEN%20NICK/Pages/default.aspx) and the following industry articles: Afan (2009), Becker (2004), Levin, (2007).