Something Scary Is Out There: Remembrances of Where the Threat Was Located by Preschool Children and Adults with Nighttime Fear

Richard G Coss

doi:10.1007/s40806-021-00279-9

Abstract

Young children frequently report imaginary scary things in their bedrooms at night. This study examined the remembrances of 140 preschool children and 404 adults selecting either above, side, or below locations for a scary thing relative to their beds. The theoretical framework for this investigation posited that sexual-size dimorphism in Australopithecus afarensis, the presumed human ancestor in the Middle Pliocene, constrained sleeping site choice to mitigate predation. Smaller-bodied females nesting in trees would have anticipated predatory attacks from below, while male nesting on the ground would have anticipated attacks from their side. Such anticipation of nighttime attacks from below is present in many arboreal primates and might still persist as a cognitive relict in humans. In remembrances of nighttime fear, girls and women were predicted to select the below location and males the side location. Following interviews of children and adult questionnaires, multinomial log-linear analyses indicated statistically significant interactions (p < 0.001) of sex by location for the combined sample and each age class driven, in part, by larger frequencies of males selecting the side location and females selecting the below location. Data partitioning further revealed that males selected the side location at larger frequencies (p < 0.001) than the below location, whereas female selection of side and below locations did not differ significantly. While indicative of evolutionary persistence in cognitive appraisal of threat locations, the female hypothesis did not consider natural selection acting on assessment of nighttime terrestrial threats following the advent of early Homo in the Late Pliocene.

Highlights

Predation provides an explicit context impacting individual fitness that is amenable to experimental studies of antipredator behavior
Frequencies of nighttime fear of scary things were almost identical for the 3-year-old boys and girls and very similar for the 4-year-old boys and girls
The aim of the current experiment was to examine whether the nighttime fear of preschool children included historical expectations of the directions of where a “scary thing” was located relative to their beds

Summary

Introduction

Predation provides an explicit context impacting individual fitness that is amenable to experimental studies of antipredator behavior. The current study examines a feature of Bowlby’s evolutionary construct in which young children are fearful of something scary in their bedrooms at night in a manner that might reflect historical anticipation of predatory threats by human ancestors. A prospective predatory threat to a perceiver includes its relative location and distance as part of the contextual features of the whole situation. Along with the physical properties of the environment, the locations of anticipated threats can be considered “directional affordances” As described by Chemero (2003, p. 184): “Affordances, I argue, are relations between particular aspects of animals and particular aspects of situations.” Along with the physical properties of the environment, the locations of anticipated threats can be considered “directional affordances” (see Sirkin et al, 2011, p. 167) as components of this overall relationship

Methods

Results

Conclusion