The mass media present many images and ideas that have the capacity to worry, frighten, or even traumatize children. Researchers as far back as the 1930s and 1940s expressed concern that children were experiencing nightmares after going to the movies or listening to radio dramas. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the incidence of fears and nightmares was reported in several books about the effect of television on children. By the late 1960s, however, concern about youth violence led researchers to focus mainly on the potential of the media to contribute to violent behavior in children, and little attention was paid to the potential negative emotional effects of exposure to television and movies.

By the 1970s, George Gerbner began studying what he termed the "mean-world" syndrome. Through his "cultivation" paradigm, Gerbner argued that because television programming contains much more violence than actually...