BACKGROUND Tools for training professionals in rating personality disorders are few. We present one such tool: rating of fictional persons. However, before ratings of fictional persons can be useful, we need to know whether raters get the same results, when rating fictional characters. METHOD Psychology students at the University of Copenhagen (N = 8) rated four different movie characters fro...

Young children reliably distinguish reality from fantasy; they know that their friends are real and that Batman is not. But it is an open question whether they appreciate, as adults do, that there are multiple fantasy worlds. We test this by asking children and adults about fictional characters' beliefs about other characters who exist either within the same world (e.g., Batman and Robin) or in...

Characters are considered central to works of fiction and essential to our enjoyment of them. We conducted an exploratory study to examine whether the ability to sketch engaging fictional characters is influenced by a writer’s attributes. Samples of 93 Creative Writers and 114 Non-Writers generated character descriptions based on a portrait photograph. We measured Participants' experiences with...