November 2009. Patti Valkenburg has been awarded an Advanced Investigators Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for her research project: "The entertainization of Childhood: An etiology of risks and opportunities." This is the most prestigious European award for individual researchers.
November 200. Patti Valkenburg has been awarded an Advanced Investigators Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for her research project: "The entertainization of Childhood: An etiology of risks and opportunities." This is the most prestigious European award for individual researchers.
The granted research project aims to investigate the effects of children’s use of entertainment media (e.g., DVDs, computer games) on their cognitive abilities, anti-social behavior, and ADHD. In her earlier work, Valkenburg has often found that children differ greatly in their susceptibility to media effects. To investigate this assumption more systematically, she developed a media-effects model in which she identifies three types of individual susceptibility to media effects: Dispositional susceptibility (i.e., susceptibility due to genetic make-up and/or temperament), developmental susceptibility (susceptibility due to developmental level), and social susceptibility (i.e., susceptibility due to environmental influences).