Global Utilities

La Trobe University
Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering

Real benefits in imaginary friends

02 Jun 2009
Children with imaginary friends are better at learning to communicate than other children, according to La Trobe University psychologist, Dr Evan Kidd. Dr Kidd is a 2009 Fresh Science winner.

Dr Kidd and colleague Anna Roby explored the hidden world of imaginary companions in a bid to understand the benefits.

The study of 44 children showed that the 22 children who had imaginary friends were better able to get their point across than were children of the same age who did not have one. 

The researchers also discovered that children with an invisible friend or personified toy had a better social understanding, were generally first born or only children and were very creative.

The phenomenon of the imaginary friend is really misunderstood, according to Dr Kidd.  This special type of pretend play appears to be an essential component of normal development, says Dr Kidd.

Dr Kidd has gone on to establish, in further research, that the benefits of imaginary companions are long lasting. 

His study of university students showed that those who recalled having an imaginary companion in childhood were more creative, more achievement oriented, and more emotionally responsive than students who didn’t have one. 

Interestingly, however, there was no difference between any of the 44 children in listening skills.

Dr Kidd is a Charles La Trobe Research Fellow at the School of Psychological Sciences. His current research interests include sentence processing in children and adults, the acquisition of complex sentences, the acquisition of verb argument structure and verbal morphology, how children deal with lexical and syntactic ambiguity in acquisition, and the linguistic skills of children with imaginary companions. 

Dr Kidd received his PhD from La Trobe University in 2004.

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