Researchers from the Otto Creutzfeldt Center investigated the positive aspects of children's successful involvement with adventure. In the OCC Venture Camp 2022 elementary school students faced different challenges during their summer vacation, while the researchers measured the children's experienced fear by means of questionnaires and increased heart rates. For example, the children went up to a height of 7 meters with a lift truck. In another challenge, courage was required to look through VR goggles, where the children experienced a virtual thunderstorm, sat in a room with virtual spiders or rode a virtual elevator to a platform of a skyscraper to look down from there.
"Children increasingly have fewer opportunities to take risks in their everyday lives or at school," says Prof. Dr. Markus Junghöfer, who is the scientific director of the venture camp together with PD Dr. Marc de Lussanet. "This minimizes the risk of accidents, for example in school sports, but at the same time deprives children of many opportunities to learn successful strategies and self-confidence in dealing with scary situations.”
Even though the evaluation of the data is just beginning now, the children's feedback shows that the learned mastery of dares led to a significant reduction in the experienced anxiety and was experienced very positively. The long-term goal of the OCC researchers is now to be able to offer Venture Camps to all children as part of school field trips in Münster and to study their prevention of anxiety disorders in children in even greater detail.
