ABSTRACT
Children can more readily abandon themselves to the joys, perhaps it is even
the ecstasy, of an amusement-park ride or the sight of the sea, compared with
adults, who find it virtually impossible to shake off the dripping worry of the mort-
gage payments. According to David Warburton, director of human psycho-
pharmacology at Reading University, children laugh, on average, 300 times a
day. By adulthood, this number plummets to 50. But, by the same, token, a child
will be more readily frightened by a creak on the stair, by someone with a white
sheet draped over his head, or by a train roaring into the station. Children expe-
rience emotions as strongly, perhaps even more strongly, than adults, but seem-
ingly, for less good reason. We may call them ‘crybabies’, not because of the
nature of the emotion itself, but because such strong feelings have been evoked
by such a feeble cause.
