Abstract
Children’s nighttime fear is hypothesized as a cognitive relict reflecting a long history of natural selection for anticipating the direction of nighttime predatory attacks on the presumed human ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, whose small-bodied females nesting in trees would have anticipated predatory attacks from below. Heavier males nesting on the ground would have anticipated nighttime predatory attacks from their sides. Previous research on preschool children and adults supports this cognitive-relict hypothesis by showing developmental consistencies in their remembrances of the location of a “scary thing” relative to their beds. The current study expands this research by investigating whether nighttime fear in childhood, including the effect of parental threats to behave, influenced adult spatial fears in different biotic and abiotic situations. A 25-item questionnaire employing ordinal scales was given to 474 foreign-born Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese adults living in the USA. Univariate analyses of adult remembrances of childhood indicated that females were more fearful of something scary below their beds than males. To examine the influence of childhood nighttime fear on adult fears, exploratory factor analyses supported three factors: (1) indeterminate agents, indicated something scary under the bed, the difficulty locating unspecific threats, and the brief appearances of large apparitions; (2) environmental uncertainty, indicated by potential encounters with unseen animate threats; (3) predictable animals, as the relative comfort of viewing animals in zoo exhibits. Using structural equation modeling, the results suggest that childhood nighttime fear influenced only the latent variable, indeterminate agents, in both groups via the mediating variable, parental threats.
Highlights
16.5% of Vietnamese females reported living as children in houses with raised foundations compared with 3.7% of Chinese females
Examination of the frequencies of nighttime fears remembered from childhood indicated that 9.95% of Vietnamese and 21.62% of ethnic Chinese reported that they never thought that something scary was in their room at night
The interaction of ethnic group and fearfulness was statistically significant for only the below the bed location, Likelihood ratio x24 (N = 393) = 25.24, p < 0.001, d = 0.52, a comparison showing that a larger proportion of Vietnamese reported higher fear ratings than did ethnic Chinese
Summary
I’m Afraid of what’s in the Dark!. Normal fear is defined as a reaction to real or imagined threats, often originating in childhood (Morris & Kratochwill, 1983; King et al, 1988). The expression of fears in specific contexts has been investigated extensively for more than a century (e.g., Hall, 1897) and includes reports of sex and country differences (reviewed by Gullone, 2000). Several researchers have suggested that some patterns of fearfulness involving simple phobias might have an evolutionary origin (e.g., Davey, 1995; Öhman, 1986), whereas others have emphasized the role of individual experiences (Morris & Kratochwill, 1983; King et al, 1988). We will summarize our findings in the context of how anticipated or imagined threats play an important role in the cross-cultural narratives of evil spirits, reflected in contemporary literature and cinema
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