Using television to improve the social behavior of institutionalized children.

This field experiment assessed the effects of a "TV diet" composed of ten prosocial programs on the social behavior of eight-to-eighteen year old behaviorally disordered youngsters who were institutionalized in a state psychiatric facility. The influence of a post-viewing group discussion which highlighted the televised positive messages was also examined. The prosocial diet resulted in the youngsters behaving more altruistically, less verbally aggressive, and less destructively relative to those exposed to the control diet containing programs the youngsters typically viewed. The post-viewing discussion reduced the effectiveness of the prosocial programming but mitigated some of the negative effects of the control diet.