International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The capacity for media messages to induce fear has been the object of scholarly inquiry since at least the 1930s when the Payne Fund Studies launched the first systematic effort to study the impact of media on children and adolescents. As part of that effort, Herbert Blumer (1933) found that 93 percent of the children who participated in his study reported that they had been scared by something seen in a motion picture. Some scholars maintain that, taken together, the Payne Fund Studies introduced the “legacy of fear,” a phrase used to describe the main attitude that audiences had to media content at that time. Despite the prevalence of fright reactions to media indicated by Blumer's finding, there was little research on this topic for nearly 50 years. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of media-induced fear certainly manifested itself repeatedly over that 50-year period (→ Media Effects, History of ). The fact that media presentations induced fear became apparent in sporadic scholarly reports about media impact or in news reports such as those that followed the 1938 broadcast of the radio play by Orson Welles, The War of the Worlds . Researchers at Princeton University ( Cantril 1940 ) investigated reactions to this broadcast in order to discover which features of the program contributed most to the widespread panic that seemed to characterize audience response. A few scholarly reports ... log in or subscribe to read full text