Neuroscience
Hospitals can be strange, foreboding places for young children. One idea to help reduce their anxiety is to invite clowns onto the ward to foster an atmosphere of light-heartedness and safety. This may seem like a harmless intervention - certainly preferable to anti-anxiety medication - but does it really work?
Alberto Dionigi and his team studied 77 children (aged 2 to 12, including 41 boys) at an Italian hospital. The children were awaiting otolaryngological surgery. They were accompanied by their parents, of whom there were 119, including 67 mothers. None of the children had a fear of clowns (coulrophobia).
Fifty-two of the children were allocated to the clown condition. In the waiting area before surgery, two clowns from the Clown Care Unit "I nasi rossi del dottor Jumba" of Cesena entertained these children, one child at a time, for about 30 minutes, using jokes, puppets, soap bubbles and magic. A control group of 25 children didn't get to enjoy the clowns. A psychologist scored an observational anxiety scale for the children in the waiting area, and then again in the pre-operating room. The parents also completed a self-scored measure of anxiety in the waiting area and in the pre-operating room.
The encouraging result is that children in the clown group were less anxious in the pre-operating room after seeing the clowns, as compared with in the waiting area before they saw the clowns. The control group, by contrast, were more anxious in the pre-operating room than they had been earlier. Also, in the control group, the mothers' anxiety increased once they were in the pre-operating room whereas the mothers of the children in the clown group did not show this increase in anxiety.
"These results support previous research that a clown doctor's presence reduces the distress of the child preoperatively," the researchers said. Clown therapy - now backed by science! Right? Maybe not. This study has a number of flaws that undermine the conclusions.
Because the control group received no intervention at all, we've no way of identifying the active ingredient of the clown intervention. Was it the jokes? The magic? Merely the distraction of meeting strangers? From a more technical perspective, an unfortunate detail was that children in the clown group started off a lot more anxious than children in the control group. Perhaps the clown group children showed a reduction in anxiety, not because of the clowns, but simply because acute anxiety can only be sustained for so long. No joke - we really need more robust research before concluding that clown therapy is beneficial.
_________________________________
Dionigi A, Sangiorgi D, and Flangini R (2014). Clown intervention to reduce preoperative anxiety in children and parents: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of health psychology, 19 (3), 369-80 PMID: 23362335
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Can This Simple Strategy Reduce Children's Anxiety About School Tests?
The sad thing about children's exam nerves is that their fears often become self-fulfilling. Too much anxiety and they can end up under-performing relative to their abilities. A team of psychologists led by Fred Paas and colleagues has taken a cognitive...
- Does The Way Mothers Think About Their Difficult Children Matter?
Early findings have shown that the mothers of badly behaved young children think about their child’s behaviour in a characteristic way, tending to believe that their bad behaviour is intentional and has to do with the nature of the child rather than...
- Dissecting Good Parenting
How affectionate parents are towards their children, and how they respond to their children’s distress are two distinct aspects of good parenting that each have a unique effect on a child’s development, psychologists at the University of Toronto...
- Does Sexual Abuse Leave Intellectual As Well As Emotional Scars?
There’s evidence that on top of their emotional and psychological suffering, victims of child sex abuse also experience learning and memory problems. But the evidence is inconsistent, and some studies comparing abused children with unharmed children...
- Fright Week: Fear Of Mirrors
When I was a kid, I watched this scary TV show called One Step Beyond. It was kind of like The Twilight Zone, except the stories were more haunting and supernatural. An especially frightening episode was called The Clown. Everyone loves the circus. Everyone...
Neuroscience
Does clown therapy really help anxious kids?
Alberto Dionigi and his team studied 77 children (aged 2 to 12, including 41 boys) at an Italian hospital. The children were awaiting otolaryngological surgery. They were accompanied by their parents, of whom there were 119, including 67 mothers. None of the children had a fear of clowns (coulrophobia).
Fifty-two of the children were allocated to the clown condition. In the waiting area before surgery, two clowns from the Clown Care Unit "I nasi rossi del dottor Jumba" of Cesena entertained these children, one child at a time, for about 30 minutes, using jokes, puppets, soap bubbles and magic. A control group of 25 children didn't get to enjoy the clowns. A psychologist scored an observational anxiety scale for the children in the waiting area, and then again in the pre-operating room. The parents also completed a self-scored measure of anxiety in the waiting area and in the pre-operating room.
The encouraging result is that children in the clown group were less anxious in the pre-operating room after seeing the clowns, as compared with in the waiting area before they saw the clowns. The control group, by contrast, were more anxious in the pre-operating room than they had been earlier. Also, in the control group, the mothers' anxiety increased once they were in the pre-operating room whereas the mothers of the children in the clown group did not show this increase in anxiety.
"These results support previous research that a clown doctor's presence reduces the distress of the child preoperatively," the researchers said. Clown therapy - now backed by science! Right? Maybe not. This study has a number of flaws that undermine the conclusions.
Because the control group received no intervention at all, we've no way of identifying the active ingredient of the clown intervention. Was it the jokes? The magic? Merely the distraction of meeting strangers? From a more technical perspective, an unfortunate detail was that children in the clown group started off a lot more anxious than children in the control group. Perhaps the clown group children showed a reduction in anxiety, not because of the clowns, but simply because acute anxiety can only be sustained for so long. No joke - we really need more robust research before concluding that clown therapy is beneficial.
_________________________________
Dionigi A, Sangiorgi D, and Flangini R (2014). Clown intervention to reduce preoperative anxiety in children and parents: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of health psychology, 19 (3), 369-80 PMID: 23362335
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Can This Simple Strategy Reduce Children's Anxiety About School Tests?
The sad thing about children's exam nerves is that their fears often become self-fulfilling. Too much anxiety and they can end up under-performing relative to their abilities. A team of psychologists led by Fred Paas and colleagues has taken a cognitive...
- Does The Way Mothers Think About Their Difficult Children Matter?
Early findings have shown that the mothers of badly behaved young children think about their child’s behaviour in a characteristic way, tending to believe that their bad behaviour is intentional and has to do with the nature of the child rather than...
- Dissecting Good Parenting
How affectionate parents are towards their children, and how they respond to their children’s distress are two distinct aspects of good parenting that each have a unique effect on a child’s development, psychologists at the University of Toronto...
- Does Sexual Abuse Leave Intellectual As Well As Emotional Scars?
There’s evidence that on top of their emotional and psychological suffering, victims of child sex abuse also experience learning and memory problems. But the evidence is inconsistent, and some studies comparing abused children with unharmed children...
- Fright Week: Fear Of Mirrors
When I was a kid, I watched this scary TV show called One Step Beyond. It was kind of like The Twilight Zone, except the stories were more haunting and supernatural. An especially frightening episode was called The Clown. Everyone loves the circus. Everyone...