Effects of fictional media depictions of realistic threats on children's emotional responses, expectations, worries, and liking for related activities

An experiment was conducted to assess whether exposure to fictional depictions of realistic life‐threatening events (e.g., fires, drownings) affects children's risk‐related assessments that have the potential to influence longer‐term responses. Kindergarten through fifth‐grade children were exposed to dramatic versions of a housefire or a drowning or to control programs depicting benign scenes involving fire or water. The threatening scenes induced more fear and more negative affect in general than their neutral counterparts. In addition, children exposed to a particular threat subsequently rated similar events (related threats) as more likely to occur in their own lives, considered the potential consequences to be more severe, and reported more worry about such happenings than subjects exposed to neutral depictions. Moreover, liking for activities closely related to the observed threats was reduced. Responses regarding the unrelated threat (i.e., fire danger if exposed to the dramatized drowning or water danger if exposed to the house fire) held an intermediate position, but statistical decisions varied across dependent measures. Some analyses revealed a main effect of witnessing negative outcomes. However, planned contrasts showed that for most measures, subjects who viewed threatening scenes did not differ from subjects in the neutral conditions in their ratings of other threats. Findings were interpreted as predominantly supportive of incidental learning, but the contribution of generalized emotion effects could not be ruled out entirely.