Press Releases

The declining visibility of tobacco products on prime-time U.S. broadcast television shows is linked to a drop in smoking of nearly two packs of cigarettes per adult per year, according to a study by Annenberg Public Policy Center researchers published online in the journal Tobacco Control. The study found that the drop in portrayals of smoking and tobacco use in TV dramas mirrored the decline in consumption

A pair of studies involving more than 450 parents in Philadelphia that examined the effects of household smoking bans found that homes that imposed smoking bans were effective at reducing the number of cigarettes smoked at home. One study, in the American Journal of Public Health, found that smoking levels in a home did not determine whether a home imposed a ban; the other, in Preventive Medicine, profiled smoking policies in homes with children under the age of 13.

In January, the Annenberg Public Policy Center brought together scholars in the fields of communication and debate and speech at a conference in Honolulu to review and make recommendations on current projects at the policy center, ranging from FlackCheck.org's Patterns of Deception videos to Tobacco Watch to an examination of presidential debates.

A national study of teenagers suggests that school drug testing did not deter them from starting to smoke tobacco or marijuana or drink alcohol. But in high schools that had a “positive school climate,” teens were less likely to start smoke cigarettes or marijuana, according to the study, in the January issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. The study compared the effectiveness over one year of school policies of student drug testing with a positive school climate.

A study in Addiction Biology of smokers’ brain activity has found that graphic anti-smoking warning labels that produce a strong emotional response are effective at deterring the urge to smoke, according to researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Nearly three-quarters of the newspaper stories mentioning suicide and the holidays over the 2012-2013 holiday period perpetuated the myth that more people commit suicide during that season, according to an analysis by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

Nearly 90 percent of the top-grossing movies over a 25-year period show main characters acting violently, and in 77 percent of the movies those characters also engage in sex-, alcohol- or tobacco-related behavior, a new study has shown. The study published in Pediatrics, by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that more than half of the biggest PG-13 movies featured a main character acting violently and involved in either drinking, sexual behavior or smoking within a five-minute segment.

The amount of gun violence in the top-grossing PG-13 movies has more than tripled since 1985, and in 2012 it exceeded the gun violence in the biggest R-rated movies, according to researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the Ohio State University. The overall rate of violence in the biggest box-office movies has more than doubled since 1950, the researchers report in "Gun Violence Trends in Movies," published in Pediatrics.

In "Messages, Micro-targeting, and New Media Technologies," published in The Forum in October, Kathleen Hall Jamieson writes that the trend in politics of micro-targeting ads toward individual voters makes it more difficult for reporters and scholars to know "who is saying what to whom, where and with what effect."

Having trained nurses follow up on medication use with mentally ill patients who are HIV positive was effective both at improving the patients’ quality of life and biological markers for the human immunodeficiency virus, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The study is thought to be the first to