HAPPY DRAGON IS REAL, FRIGHTENING DRAGON IS NOT: CHILDREN’S FANTASY-REALITY DISTINCTION OF EMOTIONAL STIMULI

Abstract

Abstract: The focus of the study was fantasy-reality distinction of emotional stimuli in early childhood. Several factors were examined, including age differences, children's wishes, and local context. The research was conducted on a sample of 71 three to five-year-olds. Children were shown images depicting fantastic and real events and figures that elicited several emotions. They then reported whether each event or figure could occur in real life, stated their wishes regarding its occurrence in real life, and rated their emotional reaction to the image. Results revealed age-related improvements in children's fantasy-reality distinction and positive correlations between children's reality status evaluations and their wishes, as well as variations in judgment based on emotional content of presented stimuli. Children were more likely to report that neutral and happy stimuli could occur in real life and that frightening and angry stimuli could not occur in real life.Key words: early childhood, fanta sy-reality distinction, emotionResults from a wide range of studies seem to imply that there are many factors influ- encing children's ability to differentiate be- tween fantasy and reality, e.g. age (Morison, Gardner, 1978), contextual stimuli (Wooley, Van Reet, 2006), emotional content (Carrick, Quas, 2006), i ndi vi dua l differ ences (Bourchier, Davis, 2000a), etc. According to Samuels and Taylor (1994), the difficulties children experience in fantasy-reality distinc- tion arise in situations where fantasy objects, events and beings a) are not explicitly speci- fied as such and b) are emotionally charged. In fairy tales, cartoons, and during symbolic play children encounter these kinds of situ- ations on a daily basis. Therefore, it is im- portant that we gain better understanding of the limits and mechanisms underlying their fantasy-reality judgments.At first glance, the results gained in this field of empirical research seem contradic- tory. Whilst some authors report that even in early childhood children are capable at discerning real entities from fantasy/mental entities (e.g., Weisberg, Sobel, 2012; Woolley, Wellman, 1992), others claim that fantasy- reality confusion persists into middle child- hood (e.g., Boerger, 2011; Bourchier, Davis, 2000b). It would be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when children begin to under- stand the difference between fantasy and reality because of the continuous nature of the process of change (Woolley, Tullos, 2009). There seems to be a growing support for the claim that young children indeed un- derstand the difference between fantasy and reality under certain conditions but they are not always able to maintain the boundary between them. Samuels and Taylor (1994) suggest that the variation in children's abil- ity to discern fantasy and reality might be related to the way the fantasy-reality distinc- tion is instantiated.Support for their proposal comes from a study conducted by Sharon and Woolley (2004), the results of which show a contrast between children's inaccurate fantasy-real- ity judgments and their accurate property attributions. This contrast leads the authors to consider the existence of an implicit cat- egory in the minds of preschoolers, in which they place those entities they do not yet la- bel as pretend, but to which they attribute few human-like properties. By gaining new information about the world, the contrast between properties of the real entities and those of fantasy entities increases, which might help children at fantasy-reality distinc- tion. The study showed that children suc- cessfully differentiate between real and fan- tasy entities in their attributions of proper- ties (e.g., physical, social) before they are capable of successfully judging whether those entities belong to the 'real' or 'pre- tend' category.Another field of research alerting to the fact that children are not always able to main- tain the fantasy-reality boundary is the re- search on fantasy-reality confusion in emo- tionally charged situations. …