A Two-Wave Panel Investigation of the Influence of Viewing Prosocial Behaviour on Television on the Sociality of Elementary School Children in Japan.

To investigate the influence of television viewing on the attentive awareness and actual prosocial behaviour of elementary school children, a causal analysis of data from a two-wave panel survey administered to 487 children in the fourth grade and again in the fifth grade was conducted. Measures of viewers' attentive awareness included contextual factors such as depictions of reward and punishment, perceived reasons for behaviour and the amount of contact with televised prosocial scenes. The influence of contextual factors relative to viewer empathy was also investigated. The results reveal that simply viewing large quantities of prosocial behaviour scenes does not encourage prosocial behaviour. However, prosocial depictions influence the behaviour of children with attentive awareness of rewards after behaviour and those who attribute reasons for behaviour in accordance with their own developmental levels, suggesting that such contextual information does not uniformly influence viewers, but is adjusted through empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]