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Dateline: 18th April, 2004 Soaps Encourage Bullying Soaps such as EastEnders and Coronation Street encourage bullying and agrgressive behaviour, says Dr Sarah Coyne, from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, who has carried out research which appears to show that children and young teenagers are strongly influenced by scenes of aggression on television. She found that episodes of unpleasantness - snide remarks, nasty gossip, giving people the cold shoulder - feature highly in 29 soaps and sit-coms shown on British television. A study covering 250 hours of television showed that 92% of the programmes contained instances of "indirect aggression". In 60% of cases it was a female character exhibiting the behaviour. Often she was attractive and rewarded or forgiven for her actions. In fact, she says, Emmerdale, EastEnders and Coronation Street show such scenes at the rate of fourteen or fifteen times an hour, compared to four or five an hour in Australian soaps Home and Away and Neighbours. Speaking at at the British Psychological Society's annual conference at Imperial College, London, Dr Coyne claimed that this is "creating a climate of bullying and aggression," which encourages 11 to 14 year olds to behave in the same way. Dr Coyne's research will appear shortly in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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