Children's Fantasy Play Research Articles

Imaginary Companions and Impersonated Characters: Sex Differences in Children's Fantasy Play

We compared the incidence of imaginary companions and impersonated characters in 152 three- and four-year-old children (75 males and 77 females). Children and their parents were interviewed about role play in two sessions. Although there were no sex differences in verbal ability or fantasy predisposition, there was a significant difference in the form of children’s imaginary characters: girls were more likely to create imaginary companions, whereas boys were more likely than girls to actively impersonate their characters. There were no significant sex differences in the competence ratings of imaginary companions or impersonated characters. These results suggest that it is important to examine the form and function of children’s pretense to understand sex differences in fantasy play. Sex differences in the play of young children are apparent by 13 months of age (Goldberg & Lewis, 1969). Around the world there are fairly consistent differences in the proportion of rough-and-tumble activity, aggression, and use of large spaces, all higher in boys, as well as cooperation, dyadic versus group play, and preference for finemotor toys, all higher in girls (e.g., Borman, Laine, & Lowe, 1993; Cunningham, Jones, & Taylor, 1994; DiPietro, 1981; Lever, 1978; Mac

Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity

Improvisational performance has been neglected by many fields that study creativity and the arts, including both philosophy and psychology. Psychologists, for example, have focused on product creativity: activities that result in objective, ostensible products-paintings, sculptures, musical scores-which remain after the creative act is complete. Product creativity generally involves a long period of creative work leading up to the creative product. In contrast, in improvisational performance, the creative process is the product; the audience is watching the creative process as it occurs. My primary research interest is everyday conversation, and I began to study aesthetics and the psychology of creativity after I observed that everyday conversation is creatively improvisedthere is no script that guides a conversation. My empirical research has focused on three types of improvised discourse: improvisational theater, children's fantasy play, and everyday conversation.' In my theoretical writings, I use these improvisational phenomena to address several issues in contemporary psychology and social theorythe tension between structure and practice, issues of textuality, discourse, structure versus play, and heteroglossia.2 Thus my theoretical framework has evolved from the empirically grounded attempt to identify and characterize specific interactional mechanisms that are used to create a collective improvisational performance. In this paper, I will focus on some philosophical implications of my evolving analyses of improvisational group performance. In this discussion, I will make explicit the relationships between improvisational performance and product-oriented arts such as painting, writing, and music composition, by drawing on Dewey's model of "art as experience" and Collingwood's model of "art as language." Improvisational performance is relevant to the empirical study of all creative genres for two central reasons. First, the creative process that goes on in the mind of a creator is generally inaccessible to the researcher, in part because it occurs in fits and starts, over long time periods. But an improvised performance is created in the moment, onstage, and can easily be observed by the researcher. Second, many improvisational performance genres are fundamentally collaborative. Observing this collaboration onstage is relatively straightforward, compared to the difficulties of observing the many forms of collaboration that contribute to the generation of a work of art.

Improvisation and the Creative Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity

Improvisational performance has been neglected by many fields that study creativity and the arts, including both philosophy and psychology. Psychologists, for example, have focused on product creativity: activities that result in objective, ostensible products-paintings, sculptures, musical scores-which remain after the creative act is complete. Product creativity generally involves a long period of creative work leading up to the creative product. In contrast, in improvisational performance, the creative process is the product; the audience is watching the creative process as it occurs. My primary research interest is everyday conversation, and I began to study aesthetics and the psychology of creativity after I observed that everyday conversation is creatively improvisedthere is no script that guides a conversation. My empirical research has focused on three types of improvised discourse: improvisational theater, children's fantasy play, and everyday conversation.' In my theoretical writings, I use these improvisational phenomena to address several issues in contemporary psychology and social theorythe tension between structure and practice, issues of textuality, discourse, structure versus play, and heteroglossia.2 Thus my theoretical framework has evolved from the empirically grounded attempt to identify and characterize specific interactional mechanisms that are used to create a collective improvisational performance. In this paper, I will focus on some philosophical implications of my evolving analyses of improvisational group performance. In this discussion, I will make explicit the relationships between improvisational performance and product-oriented arts such as painting, writing, and music composition, by drawing on Dewey's model of art as experience and Collingwood's model of art as language. Improvisational performance is relevant to the empirical study of all creative genres for two central reasons. First, the creative process that goes on in the mind of a creator is generally inaccessible to the researcher, in part because it occurs in fits and starts, over long time periods. But an improvised performance is created in the moment, onstage, and can easily be observed by the researcher. Second, many improvisational performance genres are fundamentally collaborative. Observing this collaboration onstage is relatively straightforward, compared to the difficulties of observing the many forms of collaboration that contribute to the generation of a work of art.

Children's fantasy play and emotional understanding

Examined the relation between affective and cognitive processes in fantasy play and emotional understanding. Sixty-six children in the 1st and 2nd grades played with puppets (Affect in Play Scale; Russ, 1993), answered questions about their understanding of emotions (Kusche Affective Interview-Revised; Kusche, Greenberg, & Beilke, 1988), and completed a measure of verbal intelligence (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-111; Wechsler, 1991). The major finding of this study was that consistent, yet modest, relations were found between dimensions of fantasy play and emotional understanding. Cognitive dimensions of fantasy play, but not affect expression, were related to facets of emotional understanding. These relations were independent of verbal ability. A composite fantasy play score accounted for a significant amount of variance in a composite emotional understanding score when verbal ability was accounted for. Variations in the pattern of correlations for girls and boys suggest sex differences in the relation between fantasy play and emotional understanding. Implications for clinical research and interventions are discussed.

What's real in children's fantasy play?: fantasy play across the transition to becoming a sibling.

This study examined children's fantasy enactments during the critical life transition of becoming a sibling to determine the degree to which the thematic content of fantasy play reflects children's realistic concerns. Thirty 3-5-year-old children played with their best friend at two pre- and three post-birth intervals. Mothers kept diary records of children's concerns, worries, and events they were excited about during 3-day periods surrounding the five play sessions. Raters then evaluated the degree to which the thematic content of the fantasy play was consistent with their concerns as reported by mothers. Overall, little convergence was apparent between the themes of fantasy play and children's perceived concerns. However, a modest relationship was found between acting out positive concerns in play and sibling relationship quality. Although these results lend limited support for the notion that children's concerns are reflected in the content of their spontaneous play, they do suggest that 'playing it out' is beneficial for children.

Make-Believe Play among Huli Children: Performance, Myth, and Imagination

A Huli aphorism says, Real don't make children's talk, or the games agoba kiruba [which hand is it in?] or mbola tola [exploding mud balls]. In much the same way that Huli men don't like children, in anthropology a view has prevailed that real anthropologists don't study children's (Norbeck 1974; Schwartzman 1976; New 1994). Children's voices have by and large received only perfunctory consideration in ethnographies and the profile of child as a topic within mainstream anthropology is rightly characterized as minuscule (Chick and Donlon 1992:236). Indeed, monographs on children's remain extremely scarce. Moreover, in respect to that unique genre of variously referred to as makebelieve, sociodramatic, symbolic, fantasy, or representative (cf. Fein 1981; Singer and Singer 1977; Singer 1973; Feitelson 1977), systematic theorizing or crosscultural research is nearly invisible. There appear to be several reasons for this persistent neglect of children's pretend play. Investigating naturally occurring sociodramatic is notoriously problematic as episodes are fleeting, the actors highly mobile, and the physical presence of an adult observer unacceptably intrusive. In this regard, there are few programmatic guidelines that might assist endeavors. In part, too, how research intercalates with other levels of data so as to constitute a theory-building part of the discipline remains an enigma. Analysts have largely been content to subsume their interests in child within the broader rubric of socialization-what functions serves in producing competent adult communicators-rather than generate a set of issues or problems directed specifically at for play's sake. Perhaps, also, anthropologists have been too ready to defer to the vast developmentally oriented literature in psychology. Such studies have focused on issues related to cognitive, affective, and symbolic competencies (Werner and Kaplan 1963; Golomb 1977), personality factors as variability in individual levels of predisposition (Fein 1981; Singer 1973), the evolution of language styles (Dixon and Shore 1993; McCune-Nicolich 1981; Rubin and Wolf 1979; Garvey and Kramer 1989), and sequential trajectories in forms from early sensorimotor and sociodramatic to games with rules (Piaget 1962; Robinson and Jackson 1993). Too often, however, discussion is immured within the context of data provided by Western, Englishspeaking children subject to laboratory conditions where behavior has been variously facilitated, modeled, or suggested (McCune-Nicolich and Fenson 1984). The few anecdotal accounts there are of make-believe within the crosscultural literature have thus assumed an importance for theorists that is, to be blunt, quite out of proportion to the levels of ethnographic detail or reliability offered. Anthropological interest here has been less one of addressing issues as model of mind can best account for the development of pretend (Goncu 1989:341) than in assessing (1) what is the universal status of children's fantasy play, and what saliently similar patterns does interaction evidence? and (2) are subsistent cultural variations in behavior systematically linked to or determined by identifiable cultural practices or institutions? There are no clear answers to these questions and much disagreement exists about the validity of available findings. Analysts who indicate the low or nonexistent status of representational in many cultures (e.g., Feitelson 1977; Golomb 1977; Fein 1975; Pan 1994; Sutton-Smith 1972) - what Schwartzman (1984:49) calls the deficit hypothesis - repeatedly invoke the ethnographic cases of the Nyansongo, a Gusii community in Kenya Levine and Levine 1963:173); Manus children, whose play as the most matter of fact, rough and tumble, non-imaginative activity imaginable (Mead 1930:96); so-called disadvantaged Middle Eastern and North African immigrant children (Smilansky 1968); and positively dangerous generalizations that such is the way the New Guinean plays . …

Affective Expression in Children's Fantasy Play, Primary Process Thinking on the Rorschach, and Divergent Thinking

The relationships among expression of primary process thinking on the Rorschach, affective expression in fantasy play, and divergent thinking were investigated in first and second grade children. Sixty children received the rorschach (Holt's scoring system), a play task (Affect in Play Scale), and the Alternate Uses Test. Major hypotheses were supported because the amount of primary process thinking on the Rorschach (frequency and percent) was significantly, positively related to amount of affective expression and primary process expression in play. Also, expression of affect in play (frequency, variety, integration, and comfort) was significantly, positively related to divergent thinking, independent of IQ for both boys and girls. On the Rorschach, percent of primary process was significantly related to divergent thinking for boys. The results suggest that the ability to think imaginatively in a free-association style and the ability to have access to affect-laden material are related processes.

Affective Expression in Children's Fantasy Play, Primary Process Thinking on the Rorschach, and Divergent Thinking

Affective Expression in Children's Fantasy Play, Primary Process Thinking on the Rorschach, and Divergent Thinking

Children's Verbal Fantasy Play with Parents and Peers

Abstract The three objectives of this study were: to compare children's fantasy play in three social contexts (with mothers, with fathers and with peers); to examine the relations of children's fantasy play to their receptive vocabularies and to examine the relations of children's fantasy play to their perspective‐taking skills. The subjects in the study were 20 preschool children (32‐68 months of age), their parents and 20 peers matched for age, Each child played twice in each social context in a laboratory playroom. Transcripts of sessions were coded for categories of fantasy transformations. To compare children's fantasy with parents and peers, a gender by age by context design was employed. Analyses revealed an age X context interaction. Younger preschool children produced more fantasy transformations with their parents than with their peers, while older pre‐schoolers used more fantasy with their peers than with their parents. Girls used more fantasy than did boys. Animation with parents, situational ...

The Narrative Organisation of Children's Fantasy Play: the effects of age and play context

Abstract The intention of the study was to examine the extent to which the narrative organisation of children's play varied as a function of age and play context. Same age and same gender dyads from each of two age groups (four‐ and five‐year‐olds) were observed playing in an experimental playroom. On two occasions they played in a high structure, scripted, context (doctor props and dolls) and on two occasions they played in a low structure, non‐scripted, context (blocks and novel shapes). Narrative organisation of play was measured by the children's integration of events into complex fantasy play themes. Predicted age effects were supported to the extent that play scripts became more complex with age. Context effects were minimal; older children's play was more advanced than younger children's in the low structure context. Results were described in terms of children's ability to play independently of props present in their play environments. Further research is recommended on the effects of context on play.

The Organization of Dramatic Content in Children's Fantasy Play

Study of fantasy play as drama illuminates developmental differences in the elements of social knowledge and characterizes relations between these elements.