Brief Bio of Joanne Cantor

Joanne Cantor, Professor Emerita and Director of the Center for Communication Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is an internationally recognized expert on children and the mass media.

Professor Cantor received her B.A. at Cornell University in 1967 and studied communications and psychology at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1971), and at Indiana University (Ph.D., 1974). Her area of expertise is mass media effects, about which she has published more than 90 scholarly articles and chapters. Since the early 'eighties, her research has focused primarily on the effects of television on children, with major emphasis on children's emotional reactions to scenes involving violence and other disturbing images. This research, which is grounded in developmental psychology, has explored the types of mass media images and events that frighten children at different ages and the intervention and coping strategies that are most effective for different age groups. Her parenting book, "Mommy, I'm Scared": How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do To Protect Them, summarizes this research and its implications for a general audience. Her children's picture book, Teddy's TV Troubles, helps children and their parents cope with frightening media images and events.

Dr. Cantor has become highly visible in the national media because of her research on television ratings. In the fall of 1996, when the television industry was developing the new rating system that is now being used with the "V-chip," she collaborated with the National PTA on a survey of what parents wanted in the new system. Her well publicized finding that parents wanted content information rather than age recommendations helped bring together a national coalition of child advocacy groups to oppose the industry's age-based rating system and to lobby for more informative ratings. And as a senior researcher for the National Television Violence Study, her studies of children's responses to ratings caused the "forbidden fruit" effect of age-based ratings to be widely recognized. Her research findings led her to testify before committees of both the U.S. House and Senate, and were influential in the successful drive to convince the television industry to add content information to its age-based system. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Good Morning America, and her research has been featured on ABC's 20/20.

Dr. Cantor's research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation. She has received numerous awards for her research from the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, and the National Association of Broadcasters. In 1997 she was honored by the Madison Civics Club for her contributions to the implementation of more informative television ratings. She received a Mid-Career Award for research (1998) and the Hilldale Award for distinguished professional accomplishment (1999) from the University of Wisconsin. In 1999, the International Communication Association gave her the B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award and named her a Fellow of the Association.

Dr. Cantor has contributed to the American Medical Association's "Physician's Guide to Media Violence" and serves as a consultant to Wisconsin Public Television in their development of children's programs and their anti-violence initiatives.  She is Scientific Advisor to the Center for Successful Parenting.

Dr. Cantor also maintains an active program of evaluation research.  She has evaluated television programs including Get Real!, Cultural Horizons, and democracy it is! for Wisconsin Public Television, and is working on the assessment for Fusion Science Theater, an informal science education project emanating from Madison Area Technical College and funded by the National Science Foundation.

From 1974 to 2000 Professor Cantor taught courses in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the topics of mass media effects, the effects of television on children, and research methods. From 1990 to 1994, she was Associate Dean of the College of Letters and Science, with responsibility for the College's social science departments and programs.  In May 2000, she discontinued her regular classroom teaching duties in order to spend  full time on research, writing, consulting, and public education while continuing her affiliation with the Unversity of Wisconsin.  In 2006, she became Director of the Department of Communication Arts' Center for Communication Research.