Kristen Harrison And Cantor's Study

Kristen Harrison and Joanne Cantor designed a study, in 1999, to examine the effects, frightening media had on children and if those effects continued into adulthood. Their study had three major goals. The first goal was to classify the types of media stimuli that contributed to the fright reactions. Their second goal was to uncover the different symptoms that the participants' had within these reactions. Their final goal was to survey the developmental trend in the stimuli and the different coping strategies the participants' used. For Harrison and Cantor to accomplish their first goal they first had to decide how they would categorize the media stimuli’s. They turned to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). They
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one-hundred and three students from an introductory public speaking course filled out a questionnaire on their fright responses to media stimuli. Ninety-six of the one-hundred and three students had a response to frightening media. The majority of the ninety-six were female, at 77.1%, and the average age of the participants was 20.5. Of the seven who had no response, six of them were male. The two then turned to the University of Michigan, where fifty-three individuals in an introductory mass communication class filled out the same questionnaire. Of these fifty-three, forty-two had suffered a fright response. The second groups’ average age was 20.8 and much of this group was female as well, at 75.4%. Participants were from a range of socioeconomic status and, while ethnicity was not measured, the two universities approximate enrollment is 80% white. The analysis that followed is based on the complete sample size of one-hundred and thirty-eight. The study began with participants taking home the questionnaire where they began Part I, an open-ended response that asked them to describe their most frightening media experience. If they had completed Part I, they could then move on to Part II, which looked at measuring the details of the program they saw, where and why they viewed the program, and their different physiological, cognitive, and emotional response to
For immediate symptoms, the physiological and psychological reactions were coded in conjunction with the list of panic attack characteristics in the DSM-IV. These included: fear of dying, choking, sweating, fear of losing control, increased heart rate, numbness, chest pain, trembling, a feeling of unreality, shortness of breath, chills/fever, nausea, dizziness/faintness, clinging, tantrums, freezing in place, and crying. The last four are most common in children who experience Specific Phobic Anxiety. They then coded for the enduring effects on the participants’ daily lives. The different categories included: obsessive thinking or talking about the frightening material, altered normal behavior, avoidance or dread of related situations, avoidance or dread of portraying situations, and avoiding or dread of similar material. In addition, attitude changes brought on by the exposure to the frightening stimuli were then coded as either negative (the avoiding or disliking of anything that relates to the stimulus) or positive (the liking or pursuing of anything related to the stimulus). Next, they coded the duration of the effects from the frightening experience. The coding scheme had nine possible values ranging from 0 (having no effect) to 8 (the effect