Television programmes aimed at female tweens - children aged between eight and 12 - place a major emphasis on looks and attractiveness, a new study has found.

According to US researchers, children's concepts about themselves and the world around them can be shaped by what they see on television. They decided to focus on the issue of gender among tweens as this age group tends to watch the most television.

They focused on 49 characters in 40 American tween television programmes, some of which are shown worldwide, including in Ireland. The characters were anaylsyed in terms of their gender-related behavior, attractiveness and certain personality characteristics, such as braveness.

Two specific genres were studied - teen scene, which is geared towards girls and action adventure, which is geared towards boys.

The researchers found that one of the gender ideals shown in these programmes is that ‘girls can participate in everything that boys can, but while doing so they should be attractive'.

These programmes clearly portrayed girls as more attractive and more concerned about their looks than boys and in fact, they featured no ‘unattractive females' in them. However boys of varying levels of attractiveness were shown.

Girls also tended to receive more comments than boys about their looks in these programmes.

The researchers said that this may send the message that girls should be attractive and should work to maintain this ideal.

The study also found that girls were under-represented in the action adventure genre and that boys and men in these programmes tended to be stereotypically portrayed as brave.

"The messages inherent in the action adventure programmes are that males and females mostly participate in and do the same things, but that males are more important than females because they vastly outnumber them," the researchers said.

They added that these tween programmes put viewers at risk ‘of developing skewed conceptions about gender roles that may be limiting'.

"We therefore advise the use of media literacy programmes to help mitigate some of these potentially deleterious effects."

Details of these findings are published in the journal, Sex Roles.