Children'S experience of three types of cartoon at two age levels

Three cartoons were shown to 87 children at two age levels: 5-6 years, and 9 years. The children's experience was assessed in interviews. The younger children experienced the cartoons in a fragmentary manner and not as a continuous story, understood less of the cartoons, and tended to base their moral judgements of a character's behaviour on whether or not they identified with that character. Six months later, the younger children remembered best those scenes that had made them the most anxious earlier. A subgroup of children with abundant aggressive fantasies had a lower level of moral reasoning than the other children, preferred violent scenes, became less anxious while watching them and tended to give illogical explanations for the behaviour of the cartoon characters. The degree of anxiety provoked by a cartoon depended not on the amount of explicit violence shown but on the way the violence was presented. One cartoon, which contained no explicit violence, was considered the most frightening one due to its sound effects.