A Randomized Controlled Study on the Effects of a Documentary on Students’ Empathy and Attitudes towards Older Adults

Luciana Laganá*, Larisa Gavrilova, Delwin B. Carter and Andrew T. Ainsworth

A Randomized Controlled Study on the Effects of a Documentary on Students’ Empathy and Attitudes towards Older Adults.

Despite the rapid increase in the size of the geriatric population, no current published literature is available based on the effects of viewing a documentary covering medical and psychosocial issues concerning older adults influencing young people’s empathy and ageism.
The aim of the current study was to test whether participants who viewed an original documentary about older adults experiencing physical pain would report lower ageism and higher empathy scores when compared to participants who watched a neutral documentary.

With populations aging rapidly, ageism is becoming a pronounced social issue that will affect
societies throughout the world in the coming decades. Although aging as an individual is an
inevitable biological process for every living person, our society holds negative stereotypes and prejudices towards older adults in the form of ageism.

According to Butler, ageism is ‘‘a process of systematic stereotyping and discrimination against people because they are old’’. Even though prejudice and discrimination come in many forms, ageism has not been given as much research attention as it deserves.
In the present experiment, the authors examined whether viewing a pain-focused documentary could affect the perception of older adults and their many medical struggles among college
students, with the intent of improving empathy and attitude towards them.

Similar to previous research on the impact of exposure on empathy, the significant 2-way interaction between Group and Time found in the Profile Analysis results indicated that viewing the pain documentary did in fact impact experimental participants’ empathy scores positively and significantly.


Psychol Cogn Sci Open J
. 2017; 3(3): 79-88. doi: 10.17140/PCSOJ-3-127

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