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
There is a growing body of evidence that the mass media, especially television shows and movies, often induce fear and anxiety in children. Fear is an emotion characterized by the subjective feeling that one is in danger, and is usually accompanied by physiological reactions, including increased heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, and other forms
Deduction, induction, and abduction are three basic forms of inference that inform the methodologies of communication research as well as other fields and disciplines. Whereas the most familiar forms are inference from a general principle or law to individual instances (deduction), or from several instances to a law (induction), abduction is an equally important constituent