(www.neomundo.com.ar_/_Por_Enrique_Garabetyan) parents who felt guilty because their children “spent” hours and hours watching movies about the adventures of the young Wizard Harry Potter and his friends can sleep peacefully: a research done by psychologists of the English University of Lancaster found that a significant proportion of young people who watched films based on the books of j. K. Rowling then – exhibited in various test – enhanced the capacity of creativity and an open imagination.
The work done by these professionals is the first attempt to check if there is any benefit educational when it comes to mixing the education of children with content relating to the “magic”.
And this includes, in addition to the books of witches, other issues such as myths and legends about Santa Claus, the Easter, and the fairies.
Creative work
The study, now small, but significant results focused on analyze if there was some kind of relationship between magical thinking generated by these books and legends and the creativity shown by children in the pre-school age. And this link proved to be true.
Study was conducted with 52 boys aged between 4 and 6 years of age. The youngsters were divided into two groups and showed them to both two video clips made based on scenes from the first movie of Potter (philosopher’s stone).
Then they subjected to a series of exercises which were to show creativity and what they found was that the Group of guys who had seen the video clip where most of the scenes involved magic actions resolved creatively “significantly better” (more) test than those who saw the video clip where action scenes were only.
The conclusions
With these data Dr Eugene Subbotsky, Claire Hysted and Nicola Jones, members of the Department of psychology of the University, managed to outline the following conclusión:
“magical thinking allows children create imaginary worlds fantastic and, thus, increases their ability to see the real world and Act – and interact – with him from multiple perspectives”.
And added: “our results suggest that the books and videos on magic subjects serve to expand the imagination of children and to help them think more creatively”.
The final conclusion was more than interesting: “this type of content can be used for much more than just entertainment.” “The magical thinking of the these movies and books can be an additional source of development of imagination and creativity through lateral thinking”. More information on health and science by visiting the www.neomundo.com.ar site – simply click with your mouse above on the logo of NEOMUNDO
