Characterizing characters: How children make sense of realistic acting

Reality Status Judgments of Real and Fantastical Events in Children’s Prefrontal Cortex: An fNIRS Study

“…Research by Flavell et al (1990) indicates that 3-year-old children do not always understand that television is representational, and sometimes think that real objects are actually inside the television. Goldstein and Bloom (2015) observed a similar pattern -preschool-age children judged actors on videos to really be experiencing the emotions they were portraying. Yet other studies show the reverse patternchildren incorrectly judge video and television content to be unreal.…”

Can that really happen? Children’s knowledge about the reality status of fantastical events in television

“…When asked whether the juice would spill out when the television set was turned upside down, 54% of 3-year-olds gave the correct answer in response to at least six of the eight videos, but on a significant number of trials children reported that real objects were actually present and, hence, would spill out if the television were inverted. In another study showing difficulty with real-pretend categorization in film, Goldstein and Bloom (2015) showed that 3-and 4-year-olds fail to differentiate well between filmed actors and the characters they portray; by 5 years of age, children did make more explicit differentiation. In both of these studies, then, children erroneously judged filmed content to be real.…”

“…Bias to report what happened on television was not real Ma and Lillard (2013), Richert and Lillard (2004) 4-and 5-yearolds Children were reasonably proficient at judging real and pretend snacking behaviors as real or pretend; when they erred, they tended to say that real snacking is pretend Goldstein and Bloom (2015) 3-to 5-year-olds By 5 years of age, children are beginning to understand that actors are not the characters they portray trouble identifying drinking onion juice as a possible event because they cannot think of any circumstance where it would happen (see also Woolley, 1997). Despite erring by often judging improbable events to be impossible, even young children were quite good at categorizing impossible and possible events in stories.…”

The Distancing-Embracing model of the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception

“…It is uncomfortable to watch someone wrestle with real mental illness, shame, or embarrassment (e.g., Krach et al 2011). In the theatre, audience members may speculate that only an actor who is already troubled can portray mental illness (as, anecdotally, audiences already do for film and TV [Gerbner & Gross 1976]), or that an actor can only portray joy, extreme sadness, or pain while actually experiencing it (e.g., Goldstein & Bloom 2015;Goldstein & Filipe 2017). Therefore, audiences may believe the emotions and behaviors they are seeing performed onstage are really happening to the actor, keeping them from finding pleasure in the experience.…”