Page 308 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

11. FRIGHT REACTIONS TO MASS MEDIA 297

the Hulk character. When participants were shown a shortened episode of
the program and were asked how they had felt during different scenes,
preschool children reported the most fear after the attractive, mild-
mannered hero was transformed into the monstrous-looking Hulk. Older
elementary schoolchildren, in contrast, reported the least fear at this time,
because they understood that the Hulk was really the benevolent hero in
another physical form and that he was using his superhuman powers to
rescue a character who was in danger.
Another study (Hoffner & Cantor, 1985) tested the effect of appearance
more directly by creating a story in four versions, so that a major charac-
ter was either attractive and grandmotherly looking or ugly and
grotesque. The character’s appearance was factorially varied with her
behavior—she was depicted as behaving either kindly or cruelly. In judg-
ing how nice or mean the character was and in predicting what she would
do in the subsequent scene, preschool children were more influenced than
older children (6–7 and 9–10 years) by the character’s looks and less influ-
enced than older children by her kind or cruel behavior. As the age of the
child increased, the character’s looks became less important and her
behavior carried increasing weight. A follow-up experiment revealed that
all age groups engaged in physical appearance stereotyping in the
absence of information about the character’s behavior.
Harrison and Cantor’s (1999) retrospective study of fright responses
also provided evidence in support of the diminishing influence of appear-
ance. When descriptions of the program or movie that had frightened
respondents were categorized as whether they involved immediately per-
ceptible stimuli (e.g., monstrous-looking characters, eerie noises), the per-
centage of respondents whose described scene fell into this category
declined as the respondent’s age at exposure increased.

Fantasy vs. Reality as Fear Inducers. A second generalization that
emerges from research is that as children mature, they become more
responsive to realistic and less responsive to fantastic dangers depicted in
the media. The data on trends in children’s fears suggest that very young
children are more likely than older children and adolescents to fear things
that are not real, in the sense that their occurrence in the real world is
impossible (e.g., monsters). The development of more “mature” fears
seems to presuppose the acquisition of knowledge regarding the objective
dangers posed by different situations. One important component of this
knowledge includes an understanding of the distinction between reality
and fantasy, a competence that develops only gradually throughout child-
hood (see Flavell, 1963; Morison & Gardner, 1978).
This generalization is supported by Cantor and Sparks’ (1984) survey
of parents. In general, the tendency to mention fantasy offerings, depict-
ing events that could not possibly occur in the real world, as sources of