Abstract
The present study focuses on children's developing ability to categorize real and pretend events, their understanding regarding the permanence of the state of pretense, and the potential effects that emotional tones have on these abilities. Children's involvement in imagination was also assessed as a possible factor contributing to individual differences in reality/fantasy understanding. Sixty male and female children selected from university preschool and kindergarten classes judged happy, neutral, and frightening pictures selected from children's books according to whether they believed that the event could happen in real life. Findings show that kindergartners perform significantly better than preschoolers in distinguishing real from pretend events. Overall, children made significantly fewer correct distinctions between reality and fantasy for the frightening pictures than for both the happy and neutral pictures. Individual difference analyses between children judged to be differentially involved in fantasy did not reveal any differences in their ability to distinguish between real and pretend events. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.