Summary of Recommendations
Media Psychology, Spring 1999
Kristen Harrison, Ph.D
Republished with permission
On October 31, 1992, a program called Ghostwatch aired on British television. Four months later, two 10-year-old boys who had viewed the program were referred to Gulson Hospital in Coventry, where they were treated for persistent anxiety. Simons and Silveira (1994) reported that the more severely affected of the two boys required a hospital stay of eight weeks. According to his physicians, he exhibited extreme anxiety in reaction to the program:
(The child) had been frightened by Ghostwatch and had refused to watch the ending. He subsequently expressed fear of ghosts, witches, and the dark, constantly talking about them and seeking reassurance. He suffered panic attacks, refused to go upstairs alone, and slept with the bedroom light on. He had nightmares and daytime flashbacks and banged his head to remove thoughts of ghosts. He became increasingly clingy and was reluctant to go to school or to allow his mother to go out without him (p. 389).
This case of enduring fright caused by a media presentation is obviously extreme, but how many more children have had similar reactions that went unnoticed by psychiatrists? A number of researchers have studied the effects of frightening media, yet most have focused on short-term fright effects such as immediate symptoms that end quickly after exposure. Cantor and associates (for reviews see Cantor, 1994; Cantor, 1998; Cantor & Wilson, 1988) have developed a program of research focusing on children's fright reactions to both realistic and fantastic media content. Most of their research has centered on factors that enhance or reduce children's immediate fright reactions.
Although few researchers have measured persistent fright effects after a substantial time lag such as weeks, months, or years, anecdotal reports of long-term fright effects are plentiful. Witness the friend who saw Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho 25 years ago and still cannot shower without keeping an eye on the bathroom door, or the colleague who saw Jaws twenty years ago and cannot swim in the ocean to this day. In our research, we have collected many anecdotal reports of recurring nightmares featuring characters and creatures straight from television programs or films that the dreamer saw as a child.
Beyond anecdotal evidence, however, there are few studies examining lingering fright effects to media stimuli. Sparks (1989) found that half of the females and one-quarter of the males in his sample reported enduring fright effects after viewing scary media. Sparks, Spirek, and Hodgson (1993) measured specific enduring fright reactions including persistent nervousness, trouble sleeping, avoidance of scary movies, and fear of going into certain rooms in the home. Females were again more likely to report enduring fright effects than males: Females' prevalence rates ranged from 48% for avoidance of movies to 68% for fear of going into certain rooms, whereas males' prevalence rates ranged from 10% for fear of going into certain rooms to 43% for nervousness after viewing.
Corroborating the findings of Sparks et al. (1993), regarding the types of enduring fright effects children experience, are data from a study by Cantor and Nathanson (1996), who analyzed a random sample of parents' reports of their children's fright reactions to news. Although their 1993 article focused specifically on news, Cantor and Nathanson took additional measures of fright reactions to media in general. These data revealed that 43.2% of the 285 parents in the sample who were asked an open-ended question about their children's fright reactions reported that their children had experienced intense fright induced by the mass media. Moreover, 46.3% of those who had observed such reactions reported that the affected child experienced trouble sleeping (e.g., nightmares, refusing to sleep alone, or inability to sleep), 20.3% reported that the child seemed to be mentally preoccupied with the stimulus (e.g., talking about it a lot and asking repeated questions), and 18.7% observed the child crying or screaming. Although such immediate and enduring effects are not as extreme as the example we cite at the beginning of this article, they are still severe enough to be observed by an appreciable number of parents, and are therefore worthy of concern and further investigation.
Our study was thus designed to explore enduring fright reactions to media content in more detail. Our goals were to categorize the types of media stimuli responsible for these effects, to explore the range of symptoms that make up these reactions, and to examine developmental trends in both the types of stimuli that are most frightening to children of different ages, and the coping strategies they find most effective. To accomplish these goals, we asked a convenience sample of college students from two Midwestern universities to report their "tales from the screen," that is, enduring fright reactions they have had to television programs or movies.
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