According to the U.S Census Bureau, "the first official citywide Halloween celebration occurred in Anoka, Minn., in 1921."

There were an estimated 36.1 million "potential "trick-or-treaters" in 2005 - 5- to 13-year-olds - across the United States, which declined by 284,000 from 2004. Of course, many other children - older than 13, and younger than age 5 - also go trick-or-treating."

"There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world."

A healthy mind screens out a good many potential threats; an unhealthy mind fixates on and is consequently paralyzed by the first indication of peril. In an unhealthy fixation on potential signs of emotional danger, a team of Arizona State psychologists think they may have isolated the reason that children of divorced parents are particularly at risk for certain kinds of emotional disorders.

Analyzing data collected from 109 young adults from intact, bereaved, and divorced families, the researchers identify three different psychological outlooks. Among the young adults from intact families, the Arizona State scholars find - as they expected - "a 'protective bias' that functions to direct attention away from negative cues, thereby limiting vulnerability to affective disorder." In contrast, among young adults whose parents have divorced, the researchers recognize - again as expected - a "threat vigilance" of the sort that "may increase the risk of mental health problems." In their statistical analysis, the researchers underscore the difference they detect in attentional bias separating young adults from intact families on the one hand from peers from divorced families on the other (p<0.01).

What surprises the researchers, however, is the mental outlook of young adults from bereaved families (that is families that have lost a parent through death). Although these young adults lacked the "protective bias" of peers from intact families, they also did not manifest signs characteristic of the kind of "threat vigilance" seen among peers from divorced families. 

The researchers acknowledge their initial perplexity: "Our finding that participants from divorced families rather than those from bereaved families showed vigilance toward loss-related cues was somewhat unexpected." But the researchers recognize the congruity between their findings and early studies in which "fear of abandonment, suggestive of sensitivity to loss, has been shown to be strongly related to anxiety or adjustment problems in children of divorce." Indeed, it would appear that, even more than parental death, "divorce can produce a general sense of vulnerability to abandonment or loss."