Frightening Media and The Effects on Children

  With current times it may seem like these days younger children are not phased by much. However, regardless of thier reactions children are affected by frightening media to some extent. The effects can be both short term and long-term depending on the person and how frigthened they were.  For some people, even beyond childhood, things they may have seen earlier as a child may still scare them a little as they move into adulthood. 




Freddy Kreuger was often a frigthful sight for many young children.

 JoAnne Cantor is a famous researcher known for studying the long-term effects of frightening media. She recently wrote a book entitled Mommy I'm Scared. In the book she talks about the research she did over a 15 year time period with young children and frightening media.
Some things she disscovered were that when children are young during the pre-school ages of  2-7 are most frigthened by visual images. Things that appear scary, even if they aren't. For example a friendly mutant or monster like in the children's movie Monster Inc. Children at this age haven't yet full grasped the concept of fantasy and reality. They're more scared of things that are impossible than something or someone that could actually harm them, such as a kidnapper or burglar.

As kids get into the later elementary years, according to Cantor they become more aware of the media and news stories about things that are dangerous. They're more concerned with dangerous events that have happened and could actually happen again to them personally.
Part of Cantor's research also included having college students write papers about their earliest childhood memories of being frightened. Cantor was surprised at how vivid the papers were and how much students could describe from an earlier childhood experience. It just goes to show that there are some images and things that stick with a person throughout their life that they can't forget no matter how hard they try.
Based on Cantor's research 22% of her students reported mental preoccupation with the things they had seen. It was hard to get off their mind. Other students avoided the situations depicted in the movie. Such as avoiding dark alleys, or avoiding swimming after seeing a movie like Jaws. Some students also reported sleeping and eating disturbances due to the scary movies they had seen. It wouldn't be surprising to know if adults still have the ocassional nigthmare from something they saw when they were younger.

I also found some interesting statistics through my own research. I discovered that most people are scared by visual images rather than audio or sound effects. Based on my survey of 100 people 61% of students found the visual images to be more frigthening and  35% found the audio more frightening and 4% found both audio and visual images to be equally frightening. And I also found through my research that some students are still sligthy scared by the thought of what scared them as children.