One child in the study had two pretend playmates, a little girl called Sarah and a pet dragon, whilst another liked to converse with Bodder, a talking tomato.
Credit: iStockphoto
SYDNEY: Imaginary friends help children learn how to communicate, with benefits lasting into adulthood, say Australian psychologists.
Films and television tend to depict imaginary friends as unhealthy, but a study in the journal Developmental Science suggests that the phenomena can force children to consider somebody else's point of view, making them better able to interact with real people.
Better sentence structure
"With some exceptions, the depiction of imaginary friends in popular culture has typically been negative, such as in the films Donnie Darko or Drop Dead Fred, where the characters rely on imaginary characters due to some internal malaise," said Evan Kidd, a psycholinguist with La Trobe University in Melbourne.
"[However] there are real benefits to having an imaginary friend," added Kidd, lead author of the study.
Surveys have estimated that up to 65% of children have imaginary friends during their first eight years of life.
It's long been known that these kids master certain developmental hurdles faster – for instance, they use more complex sentence structures for their age than their peers. But researchers have been unsure why imaginary friends have a positive impact on development.
Pet dragons and talking tomatoes
To learn more, Kidd and coworker Anna Roby, a psychologist at the University of Manchester, in England, tested 44 children aged between three and six, half of whom had imaginary friends. The tests were designed to gauge how much children understood about what other people knew.
Each child was asked to describe one picture from a set of similar images to an adult, so that the adult could accurately identify the specific picture. The adult also had a set of the images, and success in the task required the child to be able to compare the images and predict what the adult already knew about them.
The researchers found that children with imaginary friends were more efficient at completing the task. Kidd believes this is because they are more experienced communicators.
"Children with imaginary friends have a lot of practice at inventing interactions between their imaginary friends and themselves, and we think being in charge of both sides of the conversation facilitates their development of conversational skills," he said.
Further unpublished work by Kidd suggests the effects can be long lasting. He found that university students, who'd had imaginary friends as children, were more emotionally responsive, more achievement oriented, and more creative than adults who had not engaged in pretend play as a child.
Creativity was a marked feature of the children in the published study. One child had two pretend playmates, a little girl called Sarah and a pet dragon, whilst another liked to converse with Bodder, a talking tomato.
The findings were announced this month as part of the Fresh Science competition, which recognises the achievements of early career scientists.
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