Intcrnat ional Journal of Psychology 20 (1985) 77-93
Nor th -Ho l l and
CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCE OF THREE TYPES OF CARTOON
AT TWO AGE LEVELS *
Ka.y BJORKQVIST and Kirsti LAGERSPETZ
iho Akudemi, Finlantt
Revised vers ion received Apr i l 1983
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
fragmcntary manner and not as a continuous story, understood less of the cartoons, and tended to
base their moraljudgements 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.
The present study was carried out in order to investigate how children
of both sexes in two age groups, some of whom had abundant aggres-
sive fantasies, experienced three types of cartoons.
Whereas much study has been done on the effect of violent films on
the behaviour of children, little has been directed at finding out how
children exprience aggression in TV cartoons - cognitively, ethically
and emotionally. Knowledge about how children experience what they
see could lead to a better understanding of a film's impact on their
behaviour.
* This research was supported by a grant from The Council for Social Sciences, Academy of
Finland. We wish to thank Mr. Pekka Kejonen, the film commission of the city of Oulu, and Mr.
Pertti Muurinen. for cooperation.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Ka1 Bjorkqvist. Depr. of Psychology, Abo Akademi.
Vlrdbergsgatan 1, SF-20700 Abo, Finland.
0020-'7594/85/$3.30 o 1985, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
78 K. Bjorkqtist, K. ltgerspetz / Children's e,xperiene of cartoons
Noble (1975) has analyzed children's experiences of films in terms of
the theories of Piaget. He claims that preschool children, who are at the
preoperational stage, experience films as a series of separate and
fragmentary incidents and not as a continuous story. This is because
they lack the ability to reverse operations and hence cannot compre-
hend concepts such as beginning, middle and end. According to Piaget,
age seven is the borderline between the stage of preoperational thinking
and the stage of concrete operations (Piaget 1952; Inhelder and Piaget
1958). With this consideration in mind, we felt there may be reason to
believe that children younger and older than seven experience films
differently. We therefore selected our subjects from two age groups, a
few years younger an