Chainsaw-wielding maniacs and brain-munching zombies are common tropes in horror films and haunted houses, which, in ordinary years, are popular Halloween-season destinations for pleasure seekers. However, what makes such inexplicable experiences so compelling, and why do we actively seek them out in frightful recreational settings? What is the mystery of playing with fear?
Researchers investigating the mystery of playing with fear show that terror entertains us most effectively when it triggers a different physical reaction –measured by fluctuations in heart rate–but isn’t so frightening that we become overwhelmed. That fine line between fun and an unpleasant experience can differ from person to person.
“By investigating how humans derive pleasure from fear, we find that there seems to be a ‘sweet spot’ where enjoyment is maximized,” said Marc Malmdorf Andersen, a researcher at the Interacting Minds Center at Aarhus University and lead author of the paper. “Our study provides some of the first empirical evidence on the relationship between fear, enjoyment, and physical arousal in recreational forms of fear.”
For many years, researchers have guessed that physiological arousal, like a quickening pulse and a discharge of hormones within the brain, can play a key role in explaining why so many people find horror films and haunted houses so attractive.
Enjoyment from these kinds of actions hasn’t been established. “No prior studies have analyzed this relationship on subjective, behavioral, as well as physiological levels,” said Andersen.
To explore the connection, Andersen and his colleagues studied the mystery of playing with fear in a group of 110 participants to observe how they responded to a commercial haunted house attraction in Vejle, Denmark. The researchers fitted each participant using a heart rate monitor, which recorded real-time information as they walked through the attraction. The almost 50-room haunted house produced an immersive and intimate live-action horror experience. The appeal used a variety of scare tactics to frighten guests, such as frequent jump scares, where zombies or other monstrous abominations suddenly appeared or billed toward the guest.
The researchers also examined the participants in real time through closed-circuit monitors within the attraction. This enabled the team to make first-hand observations of participants’ responses to the many frightening elements, and, subsequently, to possess independent coders analyze participants’ behavior and responses. Following the experience, participants evaluated their degree of fright and pleasure for each encounter.
What’s Recreational Fear?
Recreational fear refers to the mixed emotional experience of feeling fear and pleasure at the exact same moment. Paradoxically, people sometimes seek out frightening adventures for recreational purposes. “Past studies on recreational fear, however, have not been able to establish a direct relationship between enjoyment and fear,” said Andersen.
Studies on fearful reactions to websites, by way of example, have largely been conducted in laboratory settings with comparatively weak stimulation, such as short video clips out of frightening films. Such experimental installations can occasionally make it hard to measure physiological arousal because reactions may be small in a laboratory context.
“Conducting our study at a haunted attraction, where participants are screaming with both fear and delight, made this task easier,” said Andersen. “It also presented unique challenges, such as the immensely complex logistics associated with conducting empirical studies in a ‘messy’ real-world context like a haunted house.”
Plotting the connection between self-reported fear and enjoyment, the investigators discovered an inverted U-shape trend, revealing an apparent sweet spot for anxiety where enjoyment is maximized.
“If people are not very scared, they do not enjoy the attraction as much, and the same happens if they are too scared,” said Andersen. “Instead, it seems to be the case that a ‘just-right’ amount of fear is central for maximizing enjoyment.”
The data also revealed a similar inverted U-shape for the participants’ heart rate signatures, suggesting that pleasure is connected to just-right deviations by a person’s normal physiological state. But when fearful experiences trigger big and long-lasting deviations from this ordinary condition, as measured by pulse rates going up and down regularly over a longer period of time, unpleasant sensations frequently accompany.
“This is strikingly similar to what scientists have found to characterize human play,” said Andersen. “We know, for instance, that curiosity is often aroused when individuals have their expectations violated to a just-right degree, and several accounts of play stress the importance of just-right doses of uncertainty and surprise for explaining why play feels enjoyable.”
To put it differently, the mystery of playing with fear is in play when terror fans are watching Freddy Krueger on TV, Reading a Stephen King novel, or screaming their way through a haunted Fascination, they’re basically playing with dread.
Source: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/