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Because television has become so ubiquitous so quickly, it is difficult to do before TV and after TV studies.
On the other hand, studying the effects of eliminating or reducing TV is very feasible. In fact this has been done on at least a few occasions.
A lot of laboratory studies have been done on the effects of video games, but only a few laboratory tests have been done on the effects of television.
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Effects of TV on Cognition
 "The cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants is in hot water from a study suggesting that watching just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds." - USA Today (Sept 2011) and Science Daily (Sept 2011) and Mail Online (Sept 2011) and NewsFeed Researcher (Sept 2011) and PsychCentral (Sept 2011)
"Middle-class 6-year-olds matched for sex, age, pretest WPPSI IQ, and TV-viewing time were blindly assigned to a restricted TV-viewing group or an unrestricted group. Restricted parents halved subjects' previous TV-viewing rates and interacted 20 min./day with subjects for a 6-week period. Unrestricted TV parents provided similar interactions but did not limit viewing. Results tentatively suggest that TV restriction enhanced Performance IQ, reading time, and reflective Matching Familiar Figures scores." - Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (Winter 1980)
"Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we're engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" - and nothing is more intense than staring at a massive screen with Dolby surround sound while wearing 3-D glasses - we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such "inactivation" allows us to lose ourself in the movie" - Frontal Cortex (Jan 2010)
"There was greater frontal lobe activation in children when they were engaged in a picture book reading task with their mothers, as opposed to passive viewing of a videotape in which the story was read to them. Social and verbal engagement of the mother in reading picture books with her young child may mediate frontal brain activity in the child." - Pubmed (Oct 2009)
"The EEG studies similarly show less mental stimulation, as measured by alpha brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading." - Scientific American (Feb 2002)
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Effects of TV on Obesity
"Reducing television viewing and computer use may have an important role in preventing obesity and in lowering BMI in young children, and these changes may be related more to changes in energy intake than to changes in physical activity. " - Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine (March 2008)
"TV and Computer Limits Make Kids Slimmer" - WSJ Health Blog (March 2008)
"Children whose parents used monitoring equipment to halve screen time found they were thinner, a report in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine shows." - Telegraph (Dec 2007)
"Reducing TV Time Helps Adults Burn More Calories, Study Finds" - Science Daily (Dec 2009)
"For kids, reducing TV viewing may be a key to preventing obesity" -
Stanford Report (May 1999)
"The results of the study, published in Health Psychology in 1995, showed that the children who were reinforced for being less sedentary-e.g., less television and less computer games-had a bigger weight loss than the children who were reinforced for increasing their physical activity." - The Reporter (Dec 2000)
"Our results encourage the design of interventions that reduce television watching as a possible means of increasing adolescent physical activity."
- Journal of Adolescence (Feb 2006)
"Dance and reducing television viewing to prevent weight gain in African-American girls: the Stanford GEMS pilot study." - PubMed.gov (Winter 2003)
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Luckily there have been some
Before and After TV Studies
In Fuji, scientists were able to do a before TV and after TV study. The scientists looked at the effects of TV on body self-image. More on the Fuji Study.
Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan's first crime wave - murder, fraud, drug offences.
More on Bhutan
In 1973 a small town in Canada with no access to TV, had a TV transmitter installed. Scientists did longitudinal and cross-sectional studies on the residents to see what the effects were of TV.
A study in "South Africa, where TV was banned until 1975 "
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New Zealand Study
"These findings indicate that excessive television viewing is likely to have a negative impact on educational achievement. This is likely to have far-reaching consequences for an individual’s socioeconomic status and well-being in adult life.23 Although we cannot prove that watching television is causally related to poor educational achievement, the associations between viewing time and educational outcomes were strong and independent of the known confounding influences of intelligence, socioeconomic status, and childhood behavioral problems. Furthermore, this study fulfills many of the other criteria often used to infer causality in an observational study, including temporal sequence, dose-response relationship, and biological plausibility. However, we cannot rule out the possibility of reverse causation. This is likely to be at least part of the explanation for the strong association between television viewing during adolescence and leaving school without any qualifications. By adolescence, some individuals will be poorly motivated toward schoolwork and may, for example, fill their time by watching television instead of doing homework. This is less likely to be the explanation for the strong inverse association between television viewing in childhood and attainment of a university degree. The finding that childhood viewing was a better predictor than adolescent viewing of not obtaining a university degree makes reverse causation unlikely and indicates that excessive childhood television viewing has a long-lasting association with poor educational outcomes." Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine (July 2005)
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New York Study
"The researchers were able to show statistically that excess TV viewing appears to lead to poor academic achievement, rather than the other way round. They could do this because they factored the children's learning abilities at the start of the study into their analysis. The team first selected volunteers from a range of socio-economic backgrounds in New York State in 1975. Subsequently, the team assessed the children's TV habits and educational performance at age 13, 16, 22 and 33." - The Guardian (May 2007) and News-Medical.net (May 2007) and New Scientist (May 2007)
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Depression Study
"Teens who spend long hours watching television are at higher risk for depression as adults, a new study finds... “We cannot be sure it is cause-and-effect,” stressed study author Dr. Brian A. Primack, an assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “The reason that the study suggests it might be cause-and-effect is that the television viewing came first. It did not include people who had symptoms of depression when the study began.”" - Health News (Feb 2009) - More on this study - Los Angeles Times (Feb 2009)
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Television in the Laboratory
Studying the effects of video games, scientists have done a number of brain-imaging studies.
As for television, scientists have a number of brainwave and brain-imaging studies looking at the effects of commercials (helping marketers to creater more effective TV commercials).
What needs to be done, are brainwave and brain-imaging studies comparing:
- TV watch
- reading
- talking
- drawing
- playing video games.
- creative play
In other words comparing TV watching with activities that TV is replacing.
See Brainwaves & TV
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