Page 307 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

296 CANTOR

as ghosts, monsters, and witches; and by anything that looks strange or
moves suddenly. The fears of 9- to 12-year-olds are more often related to
personal injury and physical destruction and the injury and death of fam-
ily members. Adolescents continue to fear personal injury and physical
destruction, but school fears and social fears arise at this age, as do fears
regarding political, economic, and global issues (see Cantor, Wilson, &
Hoffner, 1986, for a review). The findings regarding the media stimuli that
frighten children at different ages are consistent with observed changes in
children’s fears in general.

Perceptual Dependence. The first generalization about fright-
provoking stimuli is that the relative importance of the immediately per-
ceptible components of a fear-inducing media stimulus decreases as a
child’s age increases. Research on cognitive development indicates that,
in general, very young children react to stimuli predominantly in terms of
their perceptible characteristics and that with increasing maturity, they
respond more and more to the conceptual aspects of stimuli (see Flavell,
1963; Melkman, Tversky, & Baratz, 1981). Research findings support the
generalization that preschool children (approximately 3 to 5 years old) are
more likely to be frightened by something that looks scary but is actually
harmless than by something that looks attractive but is actually harmful;
for older elementary schoolchildren (approximately 9 to 11 years),
appearance carries much less weight, relative to the behavior or destruc-
tive potential of a character, animal, or object.
One set of data that supports this generalization comes from a survey
conducted in 1981 (Cantor & Sparks, 1984) asking parents to name the
programs and films that had frightened their children the most. In this
survey, parents of preschool children most often mentioned offerings with
grotesque-looking, unreal characters, such as the television series The
Incredible Hulk and the feature film The Wizard of Oz; parents of older ele-
mentary school children more often mentioned programs or movies (like
The Amityville Horror) that involved threats without a strong visual com-
ponent and that required a good deal of imagination to comprehend.
Sparks (1986) replicated this study, using children’s self-reports rather
than parents’ observations, and obtained similar findings. Both surveys
included controls for possible differences in exposure patterns in the dif-
ferent age groups.
A second investigation that supports this generalization was a labora-
tory study involving an episode of The Incredible Hulk (Sparks & Cantor,
1986). In the 1981 survey of parents, this program had spontaneously been
mentioned by 40% of the parents of preschoolers as a show that had
scared their child (Cantor & Sparks, 1984). The laboratory study con-
cluded that preschool children’s unexpectedly intense reactions to this
program were partially due to their overresponse to the visual image of