BY STUART WOLPERT
UCLA Today
When Professor of Psychology Patricia Greenfield
logged into an unmonitored teen chat room on the Internet last
year, she was horrified at the explicit, mechanical and degrading
talk of sex occurring among strangers. The racism was even more
shocking.
“Sex
is on the minds of many adolescents, and we are seeing this
core developmental issue reflected in the chat rooms,”
said Greenfield, director of a new National Science Foundation-funded
Children’s Digital Media Center at UCLA, which studies
the virtual worlds that children create with the Internet and
how those worlds relate to their real lives and development.
“With both sex and race, we may be seeing
thoughts and feelings that, because they are considered socially
unacceptable, only come out in a medium where everyone is totally
anonymous and there are no adult monitors,” she said,
adding that talk in such rooms offers insights into the “innermost
concerns of children, and how those concerns change between
childhood and adolescence.”
“We hope to get deeper than researchers
have before into the hidden lives of teenagers. What do teenagers
do when they are together? Chat can tell us that; most adults
don’t get to see what teenagers do when they’re
together.”
In addition to analyzing transcripts from teen
and children’s chat rooms, researchers are studying how
7th and 10th graders use the Internet and how it relates to
their social lives in the real world.
One of Greenfield’s motivations for studying
chat rooms — a “room” in cyberspace where
people congregate for online conversations — is to help
parents understand what takes place in them. “Parents
need to be aware of what their children are doing in chat rooms,
and be aware of the possible dangers, as well as the benefits.
Some children are not ready for the content they will find there.”
The research team studying the culture of chat
includes Greenfield and Kaveri Subrahmanyam, associate professor
of child and family studies at California State University,
Los Angeles, and Brendesha Tynes, a UCLA doctoral student in
education. The study of 7th and 10th graders’ use of the
Internet is led by Elisheva Gross, a UCLA doctoral student in
developmental and social psychology.
The center will also study the neural basis
for the development of children’s understanding of social
relations when presented on video. This team is led by Alan
Fiske, a UCLA professor of anthropology, and includes Mirella
Dapretto and Marco Iacoboni, two faculty members of the UCLA
Brain Mapping Center, Jennifer Pfeifer, a UCLA doctoral student
in developmental psychology, and Greenfield.
The Children’s Digital Media Center is
one of the first three center grants that the National Science
Foundation has awarded for integrative developmental science.
The Center includes researchers and students
from UCLA departments of psychology, anthropology, education
and psychiatry/biobehavioral science.
Although the center’s research is in
its early stages, Greenfield already offers a piece of advice
to parents concerned about their children’s use of chat
rooms and the Internet: “It’s better not to have
a computer in the child’s room, but to keep it in a more
public room,” she said.
