Press Releases

More than 60 leaders in national defense urged Congress today to reform the way it oversees homeland security, saying that the current system jeopardizes national security and leaves the nation vulnerable to cyber-attacks, bioterrorism, and other threats.

Working memory, the ability to hold information in your mind and use it to guide behavior, develops through childhood and adolescence and is key for successful performance at school and work. A new study has found that parents’ education is related to children’s performance on tasks of working memory and that neighborhood characteristics are not.

Better driver training and closer parental supervision of young drivers could reduce some of the major risks that lead to teen driver crashes, according to a review of recent studies published online this month in the Journal of Adolescent Health. “A lot of crashes involving adolescent drivers are due to inexperience, as opposed to recklessness or the inability to pay attention to the road,” said the lead author, Daniel Romer.

Amy B. Jordan, adjunct professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Associate Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, has been named a 2014 recipient of the Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence by Non-Standing Faculty.

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.