Summary.A group of 17 children who had been removed from deleterious family backgrounds and placed in institutional care were exposed to ten 30‐minute sessions of imaginative play training. When compared with matched controls, the experimental subjects showed significant post‐training increments in levels of imaginative play, positive emotionality, prosocial behaviours, and in measures of divergent thinking and story‐telling skills, and decreases in levels of overt aggression. The variables of age, non‐verbal intelligence and fantasy predisposition were found to influence the subjects' responsiveness to the training programme, with younger, high‐fantasy and high‐IQ children being most susceptible to the influence of the trainin