Commentary: Television, Children's Health and Safety Behavior, and Pediatric Psychology

American children watch an unfathomable number of hours of television per week. The effects of televi-sion have been fairly well-studied through the years as social scientists, politicians, and laypersons have expressed concern over the social, cognitive, and behavioral effects on children of watching so much of this medium (Huston et al., 1992). In multiple studies and topical areas, communications and psy-chology research has demonstrated that children acquire modeled behavior and will imitate it under conducive circumstances. Indeed, so much research and position taking has occurred that many psy-chologists and the lay public seemingly assume that everything is known. Fortunately, every now and then, exceptional researchers come along to chal-lenge such assumptions. Richard Potts and Lisa Swisher (in this issue) have demonstrated that effects of television can be demonstrated for the topic of childhood injuries. They used an elegantly simple research design remi-niscent of that employed by Albert Bandura in the inflated clown studies. Potts and Swisher found that, when shown a safety educational video pro-gram for children, children's self-reported willing-ness to take physical risks decreased and iden-tification of injury hazards increased. In another condition involving an animated cartoon with minor background safety components, children showed an increase in hazard identification, but did not show a significant decrease in their willingness to take physical risks. Results from this study sug