Developmental Differences, Media and

Early Research on Children and Motion Pictures

In the 1920s, motion pictures thrust themselves into the lives of virtually everyone in America. Going to the movies was fun, inexpensive recreation and a frequent event for virtually every family. This national obsession with the new medium, however, sparked considerable concern over what the movies were doing to children.

In an attempt to determine the effect of motion pictures on children of different ages, the Motion Picture Research Council initiated a series of investigations. These studies, conducted between 1929 and 1932 and funded by the Payne Fund, provide fascinating insights into how developmental differences can mediate reactions to media messages. The investigations of three research teams are of particular relevance for our deliberations.

To examine the acquisition and retention of factual information presented in films, Holaday and Stoddard worked with more than 3,000 children and adults and 17 different motion pictures. Their work revealed that even 8-year-old children acquired a substantial number of ideas from films (about 60% of that acquired by adults). Indeed, the retention of information by all age groups was surprisingly high, leading the investigators to conclude that movies provide a “special learning format” yielding an unusually high retention of factual material compared to the acquisition of facts in standard memory tasks.

Dysinger and Ruckmick studied affective reactions to films. Using neurophysiological changes as indices of emotional arousal, they worked with several age categories of children and some adults (for comparison purposes). They found that scenes of danger, conflict, and tragedy produced the greatest effects on children of all ages. Romantic and erotic scenes, on the other hand, didn't seem to do much for very young children, but they were very arousing for 16-year-olds. Adults, by comparison, showed little emotional arousal to any of the scenes. The authors concluded that adults had learned to discount the films as fantasy, but children experienced substantial emotional arousal.

Finally, in a series of two dozen experiments involving thousands of children in grades 6 to 12, Peterson and Thurstone found that the attitudes of children were definitely influenced by some films. These effects tended to be greater for younger children, and seeing two or three pictures treating the same topic in the same way achieved greater results than seeing a single film. Furthermore, their findings showed that attitude changes resulting from exposure to motion pictures persisted for long periods of time.

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