The imagination of young children has notable constraints. The outcomes and possibilities
that they imagine rarely deviate from the everyday regularities they have observed and …

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting
classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model …

Traditional American schooling is in constant crisis because it is based on two poor models
for children's learning: the school as a factory and the child as a blank slate. School reforms …

I argue that psychology and epistemology should posit distinct cognitive attitudes of religious
credence and factual belief, which have different etiologies and different cognitive and …

Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults
regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe …

Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when
to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children …

Research has shown that storybooks and play sessions help preschool children learn
vocabulary, thereby benefiting their language and school readiness skills. But the kind of …

Children ranging from 4 to 8 years (n= 39) reported whether they could imagine various
improbable phenomena (eg, a person making onion juice) as well as various impossible …

To understand the nature of religious belief, we must look at how our minds process the
world of imagination and make-believe. We often assume that religious beliefs are no …

Literature is rife with examples of its power to change its characters' lives. Strangeness, as
the other side of the comfortable and the familiar, is what post-structuralism offers by making …