NEW YORK, Jul 23 (Reuters Health) -- The camera never blinks -- but TV newscasters do, and at rates four times higher than the general public, according to researchers.

The high 'blink rate' of newscasters may be due to the fact that they are "under pressure not to make errors, and the environment in the TV studios is bright and dry," conclude a team of Japanese researchers led by Dr. Kazuo Tsubota, a researcher at Tokyo Dental College's department of ophthalmology. The findings are published in the July 24th issue of The Lancet.

Humans blink as an automatic means of protecting the surface of the eye. However, certain stimuli can change the number of blinks per minute. For example, reading tends to slow blink rate, while nervousness tends to speed it up.

Tsubota's team theorized that "newscasters would blink less" because they read new items off visual display terminals.

To test this theory, they videotaped and compared the on-the-job blink rates of 24 working newscasters with those of 64 adult volunteers.

The researchers were surprised by their results -- "newscasters blink more, almost once per second, than the (volunteers), who showed an average of one blink every 4 seconds," they report.

The increased blink rates of Japanese news anchors might be influenced by work pressures, or by dry studio conditions, according to the authors.

They also theorize that the unease of news viewers might "not be due to the bad news itself, but to the high and irregular frequency of the newscasters' blink rates."

SOURCE: The Lancet 1999;354:308.

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