Why we like scary things: The science of recreational fear

November 1, 2022

Fully 62% of people think it can be fun to be scared, according to results of a survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Tubi. “People enjoy getting scared, especially at Halloween time,” said a spokesperson for Tubi, an over-the-top content platform and ad-supported streaming service owned by Fox.

What’s more, from peek-a-boo to Halloween haunted houses, research shows that recreational fear can teach us to face scary situations.

Having fun with fear is an “extremely important tool for learning,” Mathias Clasen, director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, recently told The Washington Post, adding, “We learn something about the dangers of the world. We learn something about our own responses: What does it feel like to be afraid? How much fear can I take?”

A case in point: Horror movies have gotten more popular. And in one survey of more than 1,000 Americans, conducted by Clasen, 55% described themselves as horror fans. Horror, though, is not the only genre that is described by respondents as scary fun, he said.

Many people who would not consider themselves fans of fear enjoy true-crime podcasts and novels featuring violence and murder. Others may enjoy nature documentaries about apex predators such as sharks and bears.

Even babies like being a little spooked. Peek-a-boo is “an infant jump scare,” Clasen said. Classic childhood games of tag and hide-and-seek can be thought of as simulations of predator vs. prey. “I don’t think I’ve yet come across a person who did not enjoy some kind of recreational fear,” he said.

So why do we like it? It is a combination of an adrenaline rush and an opportunity to learn about dealing with scary situations in a safe environment, researchers say. Clasen and his colleagues identified three broad types of horror fans: “adrenaline junkies,” “white knucklers” and “dark copers.”

Adrenaline junkies get a mood boost from the recreational fear experience and try to maximize that experience, such as by actively focusing on scary events or allowing themselves to scream.

When we are afraid, our endocrine system releases adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol to help prepare our body for physical action. We know the “Halloween” movie franchise’s Michael Myers is not real, but our brain still responds as if he were a knife-wielding threat. One brain imaging study found that watching horror movies activates threat-response brain regions such as the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and insula as if the danger were real.

After this rush, many people experience an elevated mood. One study examined how 262 adults felt before and after they entered an extreme haunted house. Fifty percent of people said they felt better after the visit. Brain recordings before and after showed that those whose mood improved had a smaller neural response to subsequent stressors, which is associated with the post-haunt high.

The high, though, does not motivate some horror fans. For white knucklers and dark copers, feeling fear for fun is more about self-learning and self-efficacy, said Coltan Scrivner, a research scientist at Aarhus University’s Recreational Fear Lab. “They’re able to challenge their fears, challenge themselves to face their fears.”

White knucklers try to “lean out” of the experience by trying to find the situation funny or lessening their exposure to the scary stimuli, said Scrivner. Not because they do not enjoy the experience but because “people are always trying to hit their sweet spot,” he said.

Scrivner and Clasen’s research at haunted houses found there is an inverted-U pattern to how much fear people find enjoyable. Too little fear and it is boring; too much, and it produces more anxiety than fun. And our sweet spot is probably individual.

Dark copers, the third type of horror fan, seem to use scary media to help them deal with anxieties about the world or their own lives by focusing on a more concrete threat.

By pinning down what is causing us to feel fear and dread, people can have more control over their emotional state. Over time, by playing with this fear and anxiety, people could “implicitly learn some emotion regulation skills for how to feel because you’re expressing them and feeling them in a safe place,” Scrivner said.

And there is evidence that regularly playing with fear can help when real threats arise. At the beginning of the pandemic, horror fans were more psychologically resilient, Scrivner and Clasen found. Playing with fear helps us learn what our body does under pressure and how to “make it through in one piece whether the stakes are fairly high or are fairly low,” Clasen said.

Research contact: @washingtonpost

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast