influience of films on youth?

Answer 1

Here's a summary of results from The Payne Fund Studies:
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall98/Simons/df2.htm

They found that 8 year olds will catch three out of every five things that the parents see. (Charters, 8) This means, for example, that if there are 20 murder scenes, then the child will remember 12 of them. The next thing that they learned was that the 8 year old will remember 90% of what they saw in the movie six weeks after they saw it, and three months later, they still remember the same amount. The last thing that was observed was that children of all ages tend to accept as true the things that they see in movies. In addition, the scenes that children remember the most from a movie are action scenes, especially when it deals with sports, general conversation, crime, and fighting. The evidence that was found in this part of the study makes it clear that children do pick up a lot of information from the movies that they see and will remember the scenes for a long time. Because of this, being exposed to the kind of information that is shown in a rated R film will be unhealthy for the child.