tv (Page 3)

Is that the way it really happens? – Researchers compared real homicide data to what we see on TV shows such as CSI. They wanted to find out if these shows presented real public health information and if they portrayed what really happens when a homicide is committed. The results were mixed.

When researchers at the Mayo Clinic compared two popular television shows, CSI and CSI: Miami, to actual US homicide data, they discovered clear differences between media portrayals of violent deaths versus actual murders because previous studies have indicated television influences individual health behaviors and public health perceptions.
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Children, especially girls, are reaching puberty at alarmingly younger ages every year. This is a major problem, since with longer lives and more education, most women want to put off having children to a later age than ever before. The sexualizing of children has been blamed on too much sex on TV?but now researchers have found that even watching wholesome family fare can bring on early puberty.

Gaia Vince writes in New Scientist that this is because children who watch a lot of TV produce less melatonin, the sleep hormone that has been linked to the onset of puberty.Scientists at the University of Florence found that when kids were kept away from TV, computers and video games, their melatonin production increased by about 30%.
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Watching lots of violence on television and playing violentvideo games makes kids mean and physically aggressive. A newstudy shows that the longer a kid is exposed to high levelsof TV and video game violence, the more the child is likelyto threaten and bully other kids. “Long before kids throw apunch or pick up a weapon, they’re probably treating [other]kids in a relationally aggressive way,” says David Walsh, ofthe National Institute on Media and the Family. “This is thekind of thing that becomes the breeding ground for moreovertly violent behavior as these kids get older.”
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Doctors now have concrete evidence that TV watching causes eating disorders in teenage girls. It?s long been suspected that skinny actresses like Ally McBeal make teenage girls feel fat, even if they?re not. Now a major study examining the impact of the introduction of television into two towns in the Pacific islands of Fiji shows that TV watching can be the cause of poor body images in girls. Dr. Anne Becker of Harvard Medical School found that eating disorders among girls on these islands have increased since they were first exposed to television. Fiji is a country where girls traditionally have round shapes and few of them used to worry about losing weight.read more