Children's fright reactions to television news

In a random survey of parents of kindergarten, second, fourth, and sixth grade children, 37% of the children were reported to have been frightened or upset by a news story on television. The percentage of children being frightened by news increased from kindergarten to the elementary school years, whereas the tendency to be frightened by fantastic, unreal content showed a decreasing trend. The top categories of stories producing fear were violence between strangers, foreign wars and famines, and natural disasters. The tendency to respond with fright to violence between strangers increased with age, and the tendency to be upset by natural disasters decreased with age. Proposed explanations for the observed age differences were based on developmental differences in children's understanding of the fantasy-reality distinction and in their responsiveness to perceptually salient stimuli.