Press Releases

A controlled experimental study of over 5300 smokers conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) posted to the FDA comment website (http://www.regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=FDA-2010-N-0568-0006) today shows that multiple versions of the proposed warnings produce desired effects by increasing negative feelings respondents experience about smoking a next cigarette. “By failing to study the labels’

Results released today from the National Annenberg Survey of Youth reveal that 1 out of 7 or 14% of adolescents and young adults have experienced being a victim of cyberbullying (see Table 1 below). Those who experience cyberbullying report higher rates of thinking seriously about suicide in the past year (see Table 2 below). The

Phyllis Kaniss, Ph.D., executive director of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, a longtime teaching faculty member at the Annenberg School for Communication, died Friday, December 17, after a long battle with cancer. She was 59-years-old.   Dr. Kaniss is the author of Making Local News (University of Chicago Press, 1991) and The

Recent coverage of Bernard Madoff’s son’s suicide violates evidence-driven media guidelines jointly developed by the CDC, NIMH, the Surgeon General, SAMHSA, two suicide prevention foundations and the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Specifically, research suggests that explicit description of a method increases the likelihood that vulnerable individuals will kill themselves using

On December 6, APPC sponsored a focus group of 12 local voters moderated by veteran pollster Peter Hart and held at the Policy Center on the University of Pennsylvania campus. During the session the group – which consisted of 10 Philadelphia-area residents who voted for Obama in 2008 but for a Republican candidate in the

An analysis by Annenberg Public Policy Center researchers Sharon Sznitman and Dan Romer shows that international and U.S. state differences in the emotional well-being of adolescents are strongly related to their overall levels of academic achievement. In addition, these differences are strongly related to levels of poverty at the national and state level. The article

Despite efforts by the federal government to impose restrictions on Internet gambling, college age youth are visiting online gambling sites at a growing rate, according to the latest National Annenberg Survey of Youth (NASY). Compared to the last survey conducted in 2008, monthly use of Internet gambling sites shot up this year from 4.4% to

Research conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center has found that the presence of tobacco-related content in 855 top-30 grossing box-office films, 15 movies per year from 1950-2006, has dramatically declined in parallel with actual cigarette consumption in the United States from the 1960s to 2006. In this study tobacco portrayal was defined as "The

Research conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center has found that the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA’s) rating system increasingly has assigned violent content to the PG-13 rating category. The PG-13 category was established in 1984 to warn parents about content in PG films that might not be appropriate for a child under 13.

An op-ed written by Amy Jordan, Ph.D., director of APPC’s Media and the Developing Child area, and APPC Health Communication scholars Amy Bleakley, Ph.D., and Michael Hennessy, Ph.D., appears in the April 7 edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the piece, titled “Media have a role in sex ed,” the authors argue that media should