Previous findings have suggested that people who watch a lot of television are more likely to fear their environment than are those who report being less frequent viewers of television. From this simple correlation, previous authors have suggested that television causes people to overestimate the amount of danger that exists in their own neighborhoods. The present study attempted to replicate this finding and to determine if the apparent effect was due to a previously uncontrolled factor: the actual incidence of crime in the neighborhood. Respondents to a door-to-door survey indicated their media usage and estimated the likelihood of their being a victim of violence. Neighborhoods were chosen so as to include a high-and a low-crime area in downtown Toronto and a high-and a low-crime area in Toronto's suburbs. Pooling across the four areas sampled, the previous findings were replicated. However, the average withinarea correlation was insignificant, suggesting that when actual incidence of crime is controlled for, there is no overall relationship between television viewing and fear of being a victim of crime. A multiple regression analysis and a canonical correlation analysis confirmed these findings.

No abstract

Opinion polls in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere suggest that most members of the public would like their criminal courts to be harsher. Does media coverage of criminal sentencing contribute to a preference for harsher sentencing? Most people derive their information about sentencing from the news media, and content analyses of news stories in Canada and the United States demonstrate that crimes of violence and sentences of imprisonment are overrepresented. Moreover, the news media provide little systematic information about the sentencing process or its underlying principles. This article reports the results of three studies examining the effects of media coverage on public opinion about sentencing. Subjects who read actual newspaper stories about sentencing that appeared in Canadian newspapers rated most reported sentences as too lenient. However, the specific account they read influenced their leniency judgments. Furthermore, in one experiment, participants assigned to read a newspaper account of a sentencing decision supported harsher sentences than participants who read a summary of actual court documents from the sentencing hearing. * The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Valerie Hans and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The research reported in this article was carried out under contract with the Department of Justice, Canada, in some instances, and as part of the :research program of the Canadian Sentencing Commission in others. Some of this research is ,

No abstract

Half of the subjects in the experiment were annoyed by a confederate, while with half of them he behaved in a neutral manner. One-fourth of the subjects then gave shocks to this confederate (Group 1); another fourth gave shocks to a different confederate (Group 2); the remaining half of the subjects gave no shocks to anyone (Groups 3 and 4). Finally, all subjects were given the opportunity to give socially sanctioned shocks: subjects in Groups 1, 2, and 3 gave shocks to the confederate that they first interacted with, while subjects in Group 4 gave shocks to another confederate, an innocent stranger. It was found that both aggression toward the frustrator (Group 1) and displaced aggression (Group 2) were cathartic for annoyed subjects only. In addition, annoyed subjects who previously gave no shocks, when given the opportunity, aggressed virtually as much against the scapegoat (Group 4) as against the frustrator (Group 3). No similar pattern emerged for subjects who were not annoyed. The results of the experiment support a version of the catharsis hypothesis and indicate that catharsis may occur both through direct and displaced aggression.