October 27, 2025 • 44 mins
Halloween isn't just costumes and candy. It's also a time when we indulge our interest in the scary and macabre. But there's also a taboo about gory horror movies and gruesome true crime shows - we often feel that being interested in blood and violence is unhealthy. The opposite is possibly true.
Psychologist Coltan Scrivner (author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away) says that watching a scary movie or listening to a murder podcast is perfectly natural and in fact teaches us valuable lessons to enhance our emotional resilience.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love carving pumpkins
and seeing my neighbors goofy decorations. I love seeing people
in costumes and casually running into superheroes and ferries out
on the street. I love cider donuts and Halloween candy
(00:37):
and pumpkin spice anything, and I love that feeling of
cozy nostalgia. But oddly enough, there is one big thing
I don't get about spooky season, the spooky part. You see,
I'm a complete scaredy cat. I can't handle haunted houses
or horror films, and as a professor who studies the
science of happiness, I struggle to wrap my mind around
(00:58):
why people might enjoy this stuff. But as a Halloween fan,
I also spend a lot of time wondering am I
missing out? Could I learn to enjoy the spooky stuff?
Could leaning in to fear make me happier? So this
Halloween I decided to ask the expert.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
I'm Coulton Scribner. I'm a psychologist at Arizona State University,
and I study the psychology of why we're drawn to
things that sometimes scare us or disgust us.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Coulton is the author of a new book, Morbidly Curious,
a scientist explains why we can't look away. Coulton is
a nerdy, rational academic like me. He doesn't believe in ghosts,
but he has fully embraced his spooky side.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I love going on ghost hunts. I live in a
famously haunted little Victorian town. Right, it's I got one
of the world's most haunted hotels just down the street
from me. But it's a little weird that humans scare
themselves for fun, right, I mean, the traditional thinking on
fear is that fear evolved to help animals avoid danger.
(02:00):
And so when you see something dangerous or think something
dangerous is around, it should activate the emotion of fear
and all the physiological side effects of that and the
mental psychological side effects of that, and typically the response
is to avoid whatever the thing is. In humans and
sometimes in other animals, but especially in humans, we sometimes
(02:20):
seek out feelings of fear with the caveat that we're
typically safe when we do that.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
So what is morbid curiosity? Give me a definition.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, the way that I've defined it is it's an
interest in things that are threatening or potentially dangerous. Sometimes
we're interested in actual threats, you know, if you see
something happening out in the world and it's dangerous or
sometimes we're interested in fictional threats, even things that we're
not sure could exist, like ghosts or aliens or monsters.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
And so your journey into morbid curiosity started relatively early
on with the genre that I found a little bit unexpected.
Tell me what that was.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, I was thinking back, you know, when I started
doing researching this and writing about it, I started thinking
about my own experiences, obviously with things that scared me,
but that I found kind of intriguing. It was actually
a video game. It was a Resident Evil video game
on PlayStation, I think, one that you know, probably I
shouldn't have been playing, and don't know where I got
it from or why I had it, but I do
remember that was a really scary game, especially at the
(03:20):
time and especially for someone who was five or six.
For those that don't know, Resident Evil is a zombie game.
It was kind of one of the original survival zombie
horror games. So you're thrust into this world where there's
a zombie apocalypse and you kind of have to figure
out some puzzles. But as you move through the world,
there are zombies all around, and that's that's really common
to us now, but for video games that was fairly
(03:42):
new back in the nineties and had a fixed point
of view, and so you couldn't you physically couldn't turn
around and look at things like you wanted to look
at them. So actually your perception was limited too, which
is really frightening and really unnerving, especially when you can
hear these zombies kind of groaning and so you know
they're nearby, but you can't actually turn your character and look.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
And just to be clear, you were five years old
when you were playing this.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I was, yeah, five or six, probably I must have
five or six, yeah, And I remember playing the game
and I remember, you know, thinking, oh my gosh, this
is so scary. But what I liked about it is
that there were ways to kind of get away from
the fear for a minute and kind of collect myself.
You could pause the game. Now, pausing the game just
kind of froze it.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
It doesn't really like protect you, but it has let
you literally pause for a second and kind of strategize
or think about what can I do? Right. There were
these safe rooms throughout the house where you could go
to save your game. But those were also places where
you could go and you could kind of strategize and
think about what you're going to do and plan and
sort of collect yourself and sort of go on and
(04:41):
face your fears. And when I started writing about morbid
curiosity and I started hearing about horror fans telling me
that they use horror to kind of face their fears,
I did start thinking about that experience, and I thought,
you know, one byproduct of that might have been that
I was kind of learning to overcome scary situations and
kind of learning how to control feelings of anxiety and
(05:03):
fear in a very safe setting, which I think is
what in the modern world morbid curiosity is really good for.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Your arguments is that this interest in violence, all things
morbid and creepy, it might be a really fundamental part
of our human nature, something that stems from really basic biases.
In your book, you talk about this idea of a
negativity bias and how that is interestingly and importantly universal.
What's a negativity bias and how does it play into
more bid curiosity.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
When I started studying more big curiosity, negativity bias literature
is kind of the first thing I really suck my
teeth into. Because that was what psychologists were talking about.
They were talking about negativity bias, and there was a
lot of research on it, and so I had a
lot of stuff that I could read through to kind
of get a sense of what had been done, what
people had been thinking about. So negativity bias sounds like
it's the fact that things that are negative in our
(05:49):
lives capture our attention and our memory more powerfully than
things that are positive or neutral. My issue with the
framing of negativity bias is that it's a little unclear
to me what it means for something to be negative.
I give the example of my book. If I book
a room at a haunted hotel, I expect to be
like bothered by ghost in my room, Right, I expect
(06:11):
that to happen. I want that to happen. So it's
not really a negative event from my point of view,
But it might be from someone who booked that hotel
not knowing it was haunted. And there's been some work
suggesting that humans are driven by negative events. Their attention
is but it's really threatening events that are what capture
attention even more powerfully, right, And so I think what's
(06:32):
at the core of negativity bias is a potential danger,
potential threat in many cases. So I think threat bias
is kind of at the center of morbid curiosity, which
is maybe part of a broader negativity bias that humans have.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
You told this one study in the book that I
loved about people thinking about and remembering consumer products in
their threat bias. Maybe explain that study here.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, I believe that was a past couple of Yege study.
He does some of the best work on threat bias.
I mean, he laid a lot of the foundation for
this fact that humans seem to be driven by threats.
Their attention is driven by threats. So he in one
of his studies gave people I think it was like shampoo,
and it was descriptions of like side effects of this shampoo.
And some of them were positive, it'll make your hair luscious,
(07:13):
it'll make your hair thick. Some of them were sort
of neutral, like it contains this product, or it lathers
up in this way. And some of them were negative,
like it doesn't always work or may not work for
your hair, and some of them were threatening, like it
will make your hair fall out. He did this kind
of chain study almost like the game Telephone a little bit,
(07:33):
but like where you tell people, here are these eight
facts about this shampoo, some positive, some neutral, some negative,
some threatening. Pick seven of those eight and tell your
friend about it, and then you do the next person
in line. Okay, here's seven facts. Pick six of those.
Tell your friend about those until you get down to
one where you can only tell your friend about one
of those things. And what he found was that the
(07:56):
type of information that made it to the end of
that chain, that like the one that got passed on
the most often, were the threatening types of information. So
this shampoo can burn your scalp or make your hair
fall out. And that kind of makes sense. Like if
I'm going to tell well, l worry about this new
shampoo that I've got, you know, if I have all
this information, am I going to say it lathers this way?
Or am I going to let her know? Hey, and
(08:16):
some people that like made their hair fall out. That's
the kind of information I really want you to know,
because I don't want you to come back to me
later and say, hey, you recommended the shampoo to me
and it bade my hair fall out.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
But it seems like it's not just in terms of
communication that this makes sense. Our curiosity about all things
threatening and our attention towards things threatening seems to make
a lot of evolutionary sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
I mean so I was trained as a biologist for
most of my career, and so when I started thinking
about morbid curiosity, I first looked to animals and I said, Okay,
is there anything in the animal kingdom that looks kind
of like this? Is there anything that would have been
maybe conserved across species? And one of the things I
came across was predator inspection. It's pretty much exactly what
(08:57):
it sounds like. It's when an animal, a prey animal,
inspects or pays attention to a potential predator. So if
I were to ask you what would a zebra do
if it saw a line on the savannah, most people,
reasonably so would say, well, it would run away because
a line wants to eat a zebra, right, But what
you find is that zebras don't always run away when
they see lions. Same thing with gazelles and cheetahs. There
(09:20):
was this two year study with cheetahs and gazelles where
I think it was Claire fits given. She just observed
how gazelles interacted with their natural predator of the cheetah,
over an eighteen month or a two year period, and
what she found was that gazelles would often stop and
actually just inspect cheetahs when the cheetahs weren't actively hunting,
(09:42):
and it wasn't normally distributed across all gazelles, so not
all gazelles did this to the same extent. What she
found were that it was actually the young gazelles that
did it the most. And her explanation for this, which
I think makes a lot of sense and probably applies
to humans and the way that we consume media and entertainment,
is that young gazelles were the most athletics, so they
(10:02):
had the highest chance of getting away. They were the
least at risk, if you will, But they also had
the most to learn. They actually didn't have that many
interactions with predators in their lifetime, and so learning about
a cheetah, what does it look like, where does it
hang out, what does it look like when it's resting,
what does it look like when it's moving, How do
my parents or other group members react when it's doing
this or that? That can teach them a lot that
(10:23):
will serve them for the rest of their life. And
what's interesting is when you look at humans, if you
break down the age ratio of who tends to be,
for example, a horror fan, it tends to peak around
teenage years and young adult years. Now, that doesn't mean
that there aren't little five or six year olds playing
violent or scary video games, and it doesn't mean that
there aren't seventy year olds who still love Georgia Merrow.
(10:45):
It just means that, on average, everybody has this kind
of peak and curiosity around their teenage years and young
adult years. And you see that in a lot of
animals too.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
And the idea is that peak corresponds with when we
need to learn about this stuff. It allows us to
learn some really valuable information that we could use later.
But the difference between a zebra and a human is
that humans have all these other mechanisms to learn without
kind of directly watching on the savannah. Explain how we
can witness and learn about danger in even less costly
ways than other animals.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, you know, if zeebras could make movies or TV shows,
they would absolutely make movies and TV shows about lines, Right,
that's what most of their TV shows and books and
movies will be about. Yeah, if you're an animal that
doesn't have language and transmissible culture, your only way to
learn about threats is really to learn about them firsthand.
And that's a really good way to learn about them
(11:37):
in the sense that you learn the truth. But it's
a bad way to learn about them in the sense
that it's very dangerous. And so you're going to take
fewer opportunities to learn about danger than someone who can
learn about it safely, because you're going to have to
wait for the right moment to learn about it. And
it's really important to capture that right moment. It's important
for that young gazelle to pay attention to the cheetah
(11:58):
when it's the right moment, in the right circumstances, at
the right time. But that's not going to be most
of the time now with humans. You know, let's say
we want to learn about a wolf. We don't have
to go out into the forest to find a wolf
and watch it and see what it does. Right. That
would be one way to learn about a wolf, but
that's a pretty dangerous way to learn about a wolf.
A better way to learn about a wolf is to
ask someone who has had an interaction with the wolf already,
(12:21):
or if there's some communal knowledge about wolves. Create stories
that are, you know, like in the film industry, what
they call psychologically real. The characters are behaving as if
they were real. They have believable actions. So you have
this story about a wolf and what it might do
if you ran into it in the forest in this
situation or this other situation. Maybe it's this wolf with
(12:44):
exaggerated features aware wolf, and those exaggerated features kind of
clue you into what are the really dangerous parts of
the wolf. Big teeth, big claws, fast, they can track you.
And so we can learn about any number of potentially
dangerous predators that maybe we've never even seen through stories.
(13:05):
And then we can take those stories and now we
can write them down, we can create audio visual hallucinations
of them so that they're very rich and detailed. It's
just very, very cheap for us to learn about predators.
And this is true with true crime as well. When
our mind sees this opportunity to learn about a potentially
dangerous person or predator or event and there's no cost
(13:27):
to us, I mean, that seems like a great deal, right,
of course we're going to be drawn to out of
course our curiosity will repeaked.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
We've argued that our curiosity for kind of things that
are scary and morbid falls into four different categories. Let's
kind of walk through each of those categories.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
There seem to be about four categories, four broad categories
of morbid curiosity. So those are the minds of dangerous people.
So this is an interest in sort of the thinking
behind someone who is violent or dangerous. Why are they
doing the things that you're doing, What are their justifications?
How do they get this way? And that's really good
if you know about that for predicting who might be
violent or if you're interacting with someone who is violent.
(14:02):
A second one, which sounds closely related but is actually
a bit different, is an interest in violence itself. So
this is an interest in the act of violence. This
would be you know, what the Romans were experiencing when
they go to the Colisseum, or what you experience if
you go to an MMA match or a boxing match.
It's not an interest in seeing people be hurt, which
I think is a common misconception. It's really just an
interest in the action in the event. Because violent events
(14:25):
are really consequential events. At least historically they've been very
consequential events, and they're important to pay attention to. And
you can learn a lot about the two people who
are interacting, why they're fighting, who's more powerful, who should
maybe be in a coalition with or not being a
coalition with. So you have minds of dangerous people violence,
you have an interest in sort of bodily injuries or
(14:46):
body violations. These are kind of the outcomes of interacting
to something dangerous, whether it's intentional or accidental. So if
I am in a violent fight, or I come across
a dangerous animal in the woods, or have a terrible
fall or accident, as an outsider, I can view someone
who that happened to and see what are the consequences
of this thing, or how dangerous is this event re
(15:09):
And you can kind of get a good gauge of
that by how bad the injury is or what the
injury looks like. It can also tell you something about
you know, as humans, we like to help others and
we like to heal others. And you know, if we
were only disgusted and pushed away from injuries, we wouldn't
be very good healers. So you have those three and
then the final one is one that I wrestled with
a little bit, but the supernatural or paranormal, and I
(15:30):
really I think what this is about is an interest
in things that we don't quite understand. We think are
out there, or we're getting some clues that something is
out there, but we don't have enough information. So this
could be and it doesn't matter whether you believe in
them or not. This could be aliens, it could be ghosts,
it could be demons, it can be anything that kind
of There are hints in our culture that there's something
(15:51):
out there that is intentionally obscuring itself or hiding itself.
You know, you don't often think of demons, ghosts, or
aliens as being friendly. Casper's like an exception to that, right,
Like most of the time when we talk about ghosts,
we talk about malevolent ghosts, or if we talk about
aliens or not usually thinking the aliens are going to
be our friends because they are intentionally hiding themselves. And
(16:13):
then humans, if somebody is being intentionally obscure or hiding themselves,
they usually have poor intentions. So we're kind of putting
those human psychological characteristics onto these other entities. So that's
what the supernatural category is sort of about.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
So I find these four categories really fascinating because I
feel like, if you just look at the entertainment that's
making the most money in the modern day, it's like
picking off each of these different categories, right, Like take
the minds of dangerous people, the first category you mentioned. Right.
As a podcaster, it's just obvious that true crime podcasts
are just like taking off like the data show. They're like,
I think it's the third biggest category of podcasts after
(16:49):
comedy and news. Obviously news is something we did know about,
but the third biggest category of things you want to
know about are like the strange minds of crazy psychopaths.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Also, what's in the news typically things that are violent
and dangerous. Right. There was a study published I think
now it's probably been fifteen or twenty years, but it
looked at categories of news topics throughout time. I think
it was over like a three or four hundred year
period in I think it was nine or ten different societies,
and the top two most common categories across time, across
(17:19):
cultures were death and accidental injury.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Even in news our morbid curiosity is coming back is
so fascinating. I mean, I also think about the things
in entertainment that stick with me, and they tend to
be the things that are like the most glory or
portray some sort of really incredible mind. Use this example
in the book which totally lives rent free in my
brain of watching Ridges of a Lost Arc as a
little kid, And if you've seen Bridges of Lost Arc,
(17:43):
you might remember that there's this part at the end
where the arc comes out and everybody's face starts melting,
and like that literally like sometimes still pops into my dreams,
you know, even though I haven't seen Bridges of Lost
Ark in forever. So like this kind of messing with
bodies and what bodies are capable of just seems to
be well, and that kind of mixes.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
I mean, Rages of the Lost Dark does a great
job of mixing all of these categories. It's got the
supernatural with like the arc and kind of this mysterious
thing that melts your face like a ice cream cone.
And then it has some of the minds of dangerous
people with the Nazis and with the bad guys. But
then it also has bodily injury or bodily violation with
the effects of the supernatural, and so it really does
(18:20):
a good job of, I think, capturing all these different
areas of morbid curiosity, which probably helps make it or
widely enjoyed movie, right, because maybe you don't enjoy one
aspect of that, but maybe you're really into supernatural, or
maybe you don't like the minds of dangerous people, but
you're really into the bodily injuries. I mean, you kind
of get these different features coming at you that trigger
(18:41):
people in different kinds of it would trigger their curiosity
in different kinds of ways.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
I can't handle much violence or gore and anything involving
ghosts or zombies. I'm sleeping with the lights on. But
I do love a good true crime documentary. So maybe
I've got a little morbid curiosity in me after all,
which got me thinking, when does our fascination with spooky
stuff actually begin? Turns out a lot earlier than you
(19:05):
might imagine. After the Break, we'll hear more about our
obsession with spirits, spooks, and psychopaths, and we'll find out
why kids often like to mix a little fear into
their fun. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.
(19:27):
So it seems like our morbid curiosity is just like
all over entertainment, from like movies, from action to horror,
to true crime podcast to like watching MMA and you know,
World Wrestling Federation and all this stuff. But I get
the sense that people are a little bit freaked out
about morbid curiosity, both in themselves and in other people.
And in your book you talk about how often people's
morbid curiosity is used as a scapegoat. Explain what you
(19:49):
mean there.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, well, I think you know that you see this
with serial killers especially, or any kind of you know,
if you watch a true crime documentary, they always go
back and they ask what happened in this individual's childhood
that causes them to be like they are. Now, that's
that's not a bad thing to ask. I don't think
that's an interesting thing. It's it's potentially useful. But the
problem is sometimes you find the one thing that you're
(20:11):
a little biased to think caused it, and then as
soon as that pops up, you say, aha, that's why
they've done it. So, you know, one example that I
give is with Jeffrey Dahmer, So Dahmer serial killer, cannibal horrible,
atrocious crimes. Really had this obsession with one particular horror movie.
I don't even know if he was a horror movie fan,
but he had this obsession with The Exorcist three, which
(20:33):
is kind of an obscure film a little bit, but
it is about a serial killer, and he did kind
of supposedly emulate or try to emulate this villain in
the film. And when people found that out, they went, ah,
of course, he's a cannibalistic serial killer. He watched The
Exorcist three over and over again. Another famous example is
with the Columbine Shooters. You know they played. I don't
(20:55):
remember the exact games. I think it was like some
you know, action game that had some violence in it.
And so when people found that out, because of course
with these kids, they said, oh my god, what could
have caused these kids to do this? And the first
thing that came up was it was violenteo games that
must have caused it. But really, you know, I mean,
there's a lot of things wrong with that. One is
that studies that have looked at school shooters have found
(21:17):
that they actually are less interested in violent video games
than non school shooters, right, and that's of course a
very small sample size against a very very large sample size,
so there's some maybe some problems with that, But it
doesn't seem clear that like all school shooters are obsessed
with violent video games or something. And with Dahmer, I think,
you know, the thing that's funny to me is that
the same more be curiosity that people are blaming for
(21:40):
his crimes is also why those people are interested in
his crimes in the first place and what caused.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Them, Right, that's why they're listening to podcasts about him
and watching Netflix series about him and so on.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yes, exactly, you know, it's a different subcategory of but
it's still this interest in things that are violent or dangerous. Right,
So are some serial killers interested in violence? Yeah? I
would say probably. Right, they are violent individuals, They're probably
going to be interested in violence. But it's shortsighted to
think that because they're interested in violence that caused their violence.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
So the idea is, when the cost of learning about
our thread are low, it's super advantageous to pay attention
to it and become curious about it, which is where
horror movies and podcasts and video games and all this
stuff comes from. We've been talking about how like younger
individuals like the young gazelle's and things like that, are
learning about the lions. But there's also something that animals
do a lot that lets them learn, which is specifically
(22:32):
about play, and so kind of explain what play is
and why it's so powerful for animals evolutionarily, right.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Play has been kind of a tricky topic for people
who study animals because it doesn't have a good definition,
because we're not really sure what play is or what
it's for the best definition that I've come across for
play is that play helps animals safely or more safely
practice either events or rehearse events or interactions that they
might experience later in life. And that makes a lot
(23:00):
of sense, right. So, for example, with dogs, dogs engage
in rough and tumble play. This involves usually them rolling
around kind of chasing each other. This is like what
wolves do as adults. Wolves are chase predators, if you will,
so they don't really stalk their prey. They kind of
once they see them, they chase them. And this is
what if you have a dog at home, this is
what they do. They like could play fetch, they go,
(23:21):
and they chase things, right, Cats also engage in play,
but they engage in a very different kind of play.
So when cats play with each other, they do tend
to kind of stalk each other. They do tend to
kind of hide and jump out at each other, and
this is exactly what cats do to their prey, right
they're stalker predators. So there are these kind of species
specific types of play that you see, and humans we
(23:44):
do a lot of group play. You know, you see
kids on the playground, and like, you can give them
activities to do, but if you just let them do
their own games or come up with their own way
to entertain themselves, oftentimes it will involve some sort of
group play or social dynamics, because that's what humans do.
We engage with each other, and so kind of playing
with that or practicing that is something that you see
(24:06):
among little kids.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
And you've argued that one of the kinds a play
we do is more specifically scary play. Give me some
examples of this in humans.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Humans are a little unique in that they tend to
play a bit longer in life. But of course kids
are still sort of the perfect players, right, Like they
would spend almost all of their time playing if they
could one thing I found really interesting because I don't
study kids. I'm not a development a psychologist, but I
had an experience with kids that just maybe realized, wow,
kids are very morbidly curious. So when I was in
(24:36):
my master's degree, I used to do these science summer
camps for kids, and I was, you know, a young
twenty something, didn't have kids, didn't really know how to
like teach young kids. Turns out they have very short
attention spans and need a lot of time to play. Right,
This was me growing up in Oklahoma. This is a
summer camp. Oklahoma summers are very very hot. Can't always
go outside and play because it's too hot, right, And
(24:59):
so I had to learn how to play games with
kids in this very confined area. And so the game
as a twenty something that I could come up with
that I can think of for large groups of people
was the game Mafia or Werewolf. So if you haven't
heard of this before, they're kind of variations on the
same game. But really the idea is that you have
this group of individuals who live together in a town
(25:20):
and there's some kind of predator, a dangerous person. In
the case of Mafia, it's two mafia members. In the
case of Werewolf, it's two were wolves, and the story
goes each night the town goes to sleep, so the
kids cover their eyes and two individuals who are pre
selected as mafia members come out and they choose someone
to kill, right, and then the town wakes up and
they're told so and so was killed last night by
(25:41):
the mafia. You have to get justice, which humans love
justice as well. You have to figure out who the
killer was. So there's a lot of things in this game. Again,
humans play social games where there's social deception, there's justice.
There's all these things that we do as adults that
you practice. Let's get So. I was playing this game
with the kids and in the game there's a narrator,
and I was playing the part of the narrator, and
(26:02):
because the kids were pretty young, I was trying to
be as pg as I could with a game about
killing people and then hanging them for their So I
would just say, you know, the mafia came out and
they so and so died, and yeah, now you need
to find justice. After a couple of rounds, some of
the kids asked if they could be the narrator. So
I sure, you can be the narrator, so I let
them narrate. Well, it turns out the kids when the
(26:23):
town would go to sleep at night and the mafia
would come out, the mafia were incredibly violent. I mean
there were these horrible stories about how so and so
was murdered and their guts were pulled out, and they
were thrown in the lake and their heads were chopped off.
You know that all these terrible things that were happening,
and the kids loved getting justice for that, they loved
finding someone that they could hang for these terrible crimes,
(26:43):
and so the story just became this horrible scene from
like the worst horror movie that you could imagine. You know. Later,
when I reflected on that, I was like, Wow, kids
are incredibly morbidly curious. And you see this in their
games too, you know, like oftentimes there's a bad guy
and he's out to get you or kill you or
hurts you. Even if you look at games that look
pretty innocent, games like hide and Seek or tag tag
(27:06):
is a game about a predator out trying to get
other people and get them. Hide and Seek is about
a bunch of people hiding from a predator who's out
to get them, right they're playing these games that involve
danger in a safe way and in a way that
they kind of learn how to hide, how to run,
how to interact with people, how to engage in social deception,
or how to spot social deception. There's a lot of
elements of threat or danger in the games that kids
(27:28):
even come up with themselves.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
And this is also true not just in their games,
but in so much kind of kid related culture. I
remember learning things like, you know that song ringing around
the Rosie, what's it about? Like, it's about the plague.
It's about the plague.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
You know.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
You look at Grimm's fairy tales where there's you know,
predators and dangerous things happening all the time. It seems
like we forget that kids are just super morbidly curious,
which raises this question, like, if they're really engaging in
all this stuff, does it actually help them learn or
does it help us as adults learn? And I wanted
to turn to one of the natural experiments that you
had a chance to look at when a real dangerous
(28:03):
thing did happen to us, and that was during the
COVID nineteen pandemic.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, so in early twenty twenty, I had this great
study set up. This is my first like big study
for my PhD. I curated this cabinet of morbid curiosities,
and I had an eye tracking kit that people were
going to use when they inspected. It was a very
cool study that I've been planning for a long time.
I started participant recruitment in March or February of twenty twenty,
(28:28):
and then like a week later, the school shut down
for the COVID nineteen pandemic, and so, like everyone else,
I kind of had to pivot my research and figure
something else out because now I couldn't do this project
that I had been planning. So I thought, okay, well,
the world is like in a very weird place right now.
We're afraid because there's this new virus we don't know
a lot about that's seemingly like very dangerous. There's this
(28:51):
lockdown that nobody's ever experienced, and we're kind of told
we can't go out and do the things we're normally
able to do. Everything about the world was pretty scary
in one way or another for most people at that time.
And actually there was an editor at News Scientists who
had asked this question to Mike my collaborator Mattias Clays,
and she asked him, are people who are horror fans?
(29:12):
Are they actually doing better right now because they've practiced this.
So Mattias is a professor at Oorros University in Denmark.
He's a horror literature scholar, and he and I have
worked together for many years on different projects relating to horror,
and I, you know, I messaged Mattias and I said,
this is a great idea for a study. Let's do this.
And so we teamed up with some other colleagues of
ours and we came up with what was honestly like
(29:33):
a very simple study. We recruited people and we had
them answer surveys about how morbidly curious they were, We
had them answer surveys about their personalities, we had them
tell us some demographic information, and then we created this
psychological resilience scale that measured positive resilience, which is sort
of how optimistic you are about your future and about
how well you think you can handle the stresses of
(29:55):
the future given what's happening now. And we asked people
what kind of movies they tended to enjoy. Do you
like horror movies or romance movies. Are you watching more
of these now you know? Are you watching fewer of them?
Have you seen any pandemic movies you know in your lifetime.
What we thought we would find was that people who
were horror fans and morbidly curious might be a bit
higher in psychological resilience, and that is what we found
(30:17):
with some weird caveats. So people who were horror movie
fans reported much lower physiological distress during the pandemic, so
they were feeling lower levels of anxiety, depression, sleeplessness. People
who were morbidly curious reported higher levels of positive resilience,
meaning they were more optimistic about their ability to handle
(30:39):
this particular stress going forward. They were optimistic that they
could get through it. And then one interesting finding was
that people who had seen just one pandemic movie that's
all you had to see was one, reported they were
much more prepared for the pandemic and more resilient during it.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
So our morbid curiosity about scary situations might actually give
us a little protection when similar events happen in real life.
But what about the everyday scares that life stress and
work anxiety that so many of us face. Could braving
a film like Psycho or The sh Shining help us
handle those two. When we get back from the break,
Colton will share how flirting with fear might help us
(31:15):
get better at handling our tough emotions. The Happiness Lab
will be right back. I always assumed that scaredy cats
like me usually stick to the comedies and steer clear
of the thrillers, But it turns out it's not that simple.
(31:36):
When people are feeling anxious or stressed out, they're just
as likely, if not more so, to grab a scary
movie and cozy up on the couch for a good fright.
I asked horror expert doctor Colton Scrivner to break down
the research on why that is.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
You would think that people who are anxious or are
scaredy cats are the kind of people who would avoid horror,
and that, again, on its face, makes a lot of sense.
If you're really afraid, why seek out something that's just
going to make you more afraid. When I started thinking
about this topic of like who goes out to see
scary movies? I had that initial thought too, people who
are not anxious, right, because why would they do that?
(32:12):
But then again I thought about it a little differently
a little more, and I thought, well, those are also
the kinds of people who are going to want to
learn about this stuff. They should be actually seeking out information.
And so I dug into the literature to see if
anybody had tested this, and there was one really cool
sort of field study on this. So pre streaming, there
were physical places you would go to rent your movies.
(32:34):
Right you would walk into Blockbuster Family Video. You would
go into the store and they would have movies everywhere
and you would browse and it was it was great.
It was a lot of fun. So these researchers, I
think this was in two thousand and I want to
say seven or eight, they set up like a booth
outside of a Blockbuster Video and as people came into
the store, they surveyed them on their mood. So how
are they feeling? And what these researchers wanted to know
(32:56):
was how does your mood affect the kind of entertainment
that you want to consume. So they sat outside this
Blockbuster store. People came in and they would ask them,
how nervous are you feeling, how angry are you feeling,
how happy are you feeling? And you know, reasonably, so
they assumed that people who were anxious would probably seek
out something kind of happy to help them get into
(33:16):
a better mood. People who were feeling bored might seek
you out an action movie. So the idea was like,
you would kind of seek the opposite of what you
were feeling in order to get you to this state
that you wanted to be in. So people would go
in the store and they would browse, they would pick
their movies, and they would come out, and when they
came out, the researchers would say, hey, can you tell
us what kind of movie? What movies did you get?
And then they would note down the genre of the movie.
(33:39):
And what they found, at least for horror, was the
exact opposite of what they thought. So the people who
came in feeling anxious and nervous, those were the people
most likely to watch a horror movie.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
So those findings violate all my intuitions. But they also
raise this really they also raise this really interesting question,
which is that like, maybe scary movies actually can help
us become less anxious. And so how did researchers wind
up testing that?
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Well, when I started looking into this, when I started
looking into okay, what does it mean that anxious people
sometimes seek out scary movies. There wasn't much in the literature,
and so I actually went to like Reddit threads and
online articles, op eds, and magazines because people were talking
about this. A lot real people in the world were
talking about this, but academics were not, And a lot
(34:26):
of people would talk about how they accidentally discovered that
when they were feeling anxious. Feel like, these are people
who have oftentimes like clinical anxiety, or maybe they were
just having a really anxious time in their life. They
would feel this like strange urge to turn on something scary,
even if they were not horror fans, even if they
had never been horror fans, and they discovered that it
(34:48):
kind of helped them calm down or get through that.
And I thought that was super intriguing, and it kind
of matched up with this blockbuster study. So I thought, Okay,
there's got to be a way to do an academic
study on this. So we created this survey that again
had a bunch of different statements about why people like
horror moves, and we collected these from all over the
(35:08):
internet and magazines and you know, just people talking about
why they like horror movies. And what we found were
that horror fans seem to be lumped into kind of
three types, right, and these aren't mutually exclusive with each other,
but there's sort of three broad types. There's the adrenaline
junkie who does like horror because it kind of makes
them feel alive, and this is kind of the classic
psychological explanation for why people like scary things that are playful,
(35:33):
same reason that they enjoy roller coaster or skydiving or
any other high adrenaline activity. But there's another group that
we called the white knucklers because you're just like watching
the movie with your fists clinch. These are people who
are truly afraid, like very afraid of what's going on,
but they still choose to do it. So those people
were really interesting to us because we wanted to know, like,
why are you doing this if you're truly afraid of it?
(35:53):
And then we found this third group that we didn't
necessarily expect to find, and we decided to call them
the dark copers because these people essentially were telling us
that they use scary things to help them get through
difficult times in their life. That could be depression, it
could be anxiety, it could be kind of thinking about
existential problems. And so at the time, I was doing
(36:14):
these sort of yearly or annual haunted house studies in
Denmark with my collaborator Mattias. So there's this haunted attraction
like you go to in Halloween, right, a haunted house
near or who's where Mattias was based, and so I
would go visit him for a few weeks and we
would actually go to this haunted house and kind of
like the Blockbuster study, we would set up this big
research tent outside the haunted house where people would take
(36:37):
surveys or we would strap them up to heart rate monitors,
and we wanted to kind of know like, how are
these people playing with fear? How are they engaging in
scary play in the real world. So we had these
three groups identified, we had the survey created, we took
it to the haunted house. We had people take the
survey before they went in, and then when they came out,
we asked them what do you feel like you got
(36:57):
out of this experience, Like did you get a mood boost,
do you feel like you learned something about yourself? Do
you feel like you've kind of developed as an individual
like you would in therapy or something. And what we
found were that there were distinct benefits to these different
kinds of horror fans. So people who were adrenaline junkies,
they mostly did like it because they got the mood boost.
They didn't say that they learned anything about themselves. They
(37:19):
didn't say that they developed as a person. They just
kind of enjoyed the experience. But what was interesting is
that the adrenaline junkies were a really small portion of
our participants. The other probably two thirds to the people
identified based on our survey as white knucklers or dark copers.
And these people said that they learned something about themselves
and kind of developed as a person. And when you
(37:40):
ask them, you know, what do you mean by that,
they would say things like I learned the boundaries of
my fear, kind of like what I could handle them,
what I can't. I learned how I would react in
this like high intensity scary situation that I've never been
in it before. Some people even explicitly would say, now
I know what I need to do better if I'm
ever in a situation that's scary like this again. And
usually they were talking not about the literal situation like
(38:02):
a man in a pig mask chasing you with the chainsaw.
But they were talking about the emotional situation, how do
I handle these emotions that are overwhelmingly negative in many ways?
Speaker 1 (38:12):
And this relates to a few things that we talk
about a lot in this podcast.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
One is this idea that if you want to get
good at regulating your emotions, whether that's sadness or in
this case, fear, you actually have to practice doing that.
And our instinct isn't to practice regulating our emotions, it's
to avoid emotions all the time, right, And so it
seems like what your participants were doing in this case,
or at least kind of ones that identified as white
knucklers or dark copers, they use the haunted house experience
(38:35):
and the anxiety that came up there to like practice
a little bit coping. Another reason I love your studies
and it fits with the kind of stuff that we
talk about on the podcast, is that we often talk
about the problem of suppressing our emotions. Right when we're
feeling anxious, our move is like, oh, shut it off,
pretend it's not happening. But a lot of the research
suggests that the way you get through a negative emotion
like anxieties to actually feel it, and maybe what better
(38:57):
way to feel it than to like really ramp it
up in some like incredibly intense haunted house, safe and
in a safe way exactly Again.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
It kind of goes back to this idea of play.
I think this is just an example of scary play.
And if the point of play is to rehearse situations, well,
situations can be literal. They can be I need to
know how to run, or I need to know how to,
like if I'm disoriented, how to get away. Or they
can be more psychological or emotional. They can be if
I'm feeling this, how do I recenter myself a little
(39:26):
bit and get through this.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
So, if someone's hearing all these benefits that your haunted
house scoers got out of scary play, and they're curious
about morbid curiosity, what would be some suggestions about dipping
their feet in, especially if they're somebody who hasn't engaged
in a lot of this scary play so far.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
The common mistake that I hear is that people think
they need to go out and do like the scariest
thing that they could imagine. That's the wrong way to
do it. Right, because of course that's going to be
too much. And that's usually what you hear if you
talk to adults and you say, you know, do you
like horror movies? And if they say no, you ask
them why. Usually the answer is, oh, I watched one
when I was a kid. They was too scary for me,
and I just haven't been able to watch them since.
(40:03):
But what's interesting is a lot of the people who
as adults become horror fans. And this happened to COVID
a lot actually, or had its best two years in
history at the box office in twenty twenty and twenty
twenty one. So people were seeking out these like scary
experiences for the first time, many of them, and realizing,
maybe I can enjoy this. But yeah, I think the
(40:24):
mistake that people make is that they think they should
seek out something really scary that's going to terrify them.
What you should do is exactly what developmental psychologists tell
us to do the time, which is kind of go
to the edge of what you're able to do, right,
the edge of what you can handle. And that's different
for everybody, you know. We did this study at the
Hunted House where we strap people up with heart rate monitors,
(40:44):
and we wanted to know, is there kind of like
a sweet spot of fear? Is there this optimal experience
is a Goldilock zone, because that's true for a lot
of things. It's true for learning, it's true for flow
states are we're really productive, and so we thought, well,
maybe it's true for fear too, and that doesn't seem
to be true. What we found in this study was
that there's a sweet spot. And the sweet spot is
(41:04):
a little different for everybody, but it does tend to
be kind of like if you imagine a one to
ten scale, it's like about a seven out of ten.
When they were too afraid, their heart rate was too erratic,
they weren't having as good of a time. When it
was about seven out of ten on the max, that's
when they were really having the best time, having the
most fun. And so I think what you should do
if you're trying to get into scary entertainment and you're
(41:25):
curious that maybe this could help you. Start with the
easy stuff, Start with stuff you know you can handle, right,
and then kind of just go from there and edge
up further and further until you get to something that
is kind of scary, and you do have to practice
that emotion regulation. You're kind of in your goldilock zone.
You're in your sweet spot. But eventually your sweet spot
is going to move right. You're going to get better
at that, You're going to be able to handle something more.
And I think this is what a lot of people
(41:47):
are afraid of when it comes to horror movies. They
argue that, oh, well, it desensitizes you to violence, or
it desensitizes you too these things. And I think it
does desensitize you, but not to violence per se, not
to real violence. It desensitizes you a little bit to
your anxiety and to your fear, and it allows you
to actually handle higher doses.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
This makes me very comforted that we're starting out with
baby steps into morbid curious. Someone who's really afraid of
this stuff.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
No, I need. I need to write a my Baby's
First Morbidly Curious Experience book.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
That's definitely the one that I need. My husband and
I are inspired by your book. I've been trying to
watch more horror movies and thrillers and sometimes I'm like,
time out, this is too much. We're gonna hit pause
on this. We're going to watch it again tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
That's what you should be doing. Yeah, It's like if
it's too much, like pause for a second, you know,
it's okay to like cover your eyes and portions. Those
are emotion regulation skills. Those are tactics, right, Like when
people cover their eyes and a scary scene, they're regulating
their anxiety and their fear, right, and over time they
might get a little better at that. They do have
to kind of like push yourself to peak, right, You
kind of have to like look through your fingers a
little bit.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
I'm a big fan of the turtleneck in horror movies
and glory movies. I recently watched The Substance with Demi Moore.
Great films, but a lot but the turtleneck. You can
just kind of cover up your eyes, peak with one eye,
pull it back up, put down.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
But those are skills, right, That's the kind of thing
I might need to take in a different form into
a situation that's really anxiety provoking or really scary in
my normal life.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah. Yeah, and eventually you learn to take more cognitive
approaches to emotion regulation, right. Those are like physical things
you can do. You can turn the lights on you
can turn the sound down, you can cover your eyes
and scary scenes, but you also are inherently practicing cognitive
emotion regulation skills, cognitive reframing. You know, telling yourself how
extreme I feel right now doesn't match like what's really happening,
(43:29):
So you are practicing those cognitive skills as well. So
in order to get like the optimal amount of fun,
people kind of regulate their fear both up and down.
So sometimes they want to be more afraid, and so
they kind of get into it really and let themselves
scream and like look at the actors and look at
the scary things, and sometimes they cover their eyes, and
sometimes they tell themselves it's not real. And it's all
in this attempt to regulate how afraid you are, how
(43:53):
anxious you're feeling, so that you can have the most fun.
But of course the side effect of that is you're
practicing regulating your emotions both up and down, and so
you have more kind of just mastery in general over
those negative emotions that we tend to.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Avoid so safely. Enjoying a bunch of psychopaths and monsters
may not only get your blood pumping in the moment,
it may also make you a little bit more resilient
in the long run. That's a pretty compelling reason to
dive a little deeper into spooky season this year. Now,
I'm not quite willing to give up my turtleneck or
keep my finger off the pause button, But this Halloween,
(44:26):
I think I'm finally ready to take some baby steps
towards embracing my inner scream. Queen to my fellow scaredy cats,
let me know if you decide to do the same.
In the name of a happier Halloween, I challenge all
of us to seek out a bit more spooky delight.
The Happiness Lab will be on a short break for
the next few weeks, but we'll be back soon with
(44:46):
more holiday related episodes, just in time for the season
of gift giving, So be sure to swing back for
more episodes of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie
Santo's
Pushkin. Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love carving pumpkins
and seeing my neighbors goofy decorations. I love seeing people
in costumes and casually running into superheroes and ferries out
on the street. I love cider donuts and Halloween candy
(00:37):
and pumpkin spice anything, and I love that feeling of
cozy nostalgia. But oddly enough, there is one big thing
I don't get about spooky season, the spooky part. You see,
I'm a complete scaredy cat. I can't handle haunted houses
or horror films, and as a professor who studies the
science of happiness, I struggle to wrap my mind around
(00:58):
why people might enjoy this stuff. But as a Halloween fan,
I also spend a lot of time wondering am I
missing out? Could I learn to enjoy the spooky stuff?
Could leaning in to fear make me happier? So this
Halloween I decided to ask the expert.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
I'm Coulton Scribner. I'm a psychologist at Arizona State University,
and I study the psychology of why we're drawn to
things that sometimes scare us or disgust us.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Coulton is the author of a new book, Morbidly Curious,
a scientist explains why we can't look away. Coulton is
a nerdy, rational academic like me. He doesn't believe in ghosts,
but he has fully embraced his spooky side.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I love going on ghost hunts. I live in a
famously haunted little Victorian town. Right, it's I got one
of the world's most haunted hotels just down the street
from me. But it's a little weird that humans scare
themselves for fun, right, I mean, the traditional thinking on
fear is that fear evolved to help animals avoid danger.
(02:00):
And so when you see something dangerous or think something
dangerous is around, it should activate the emotion of fear
and all the physiological side effects of that and the
mental psychological side effects of that, and typically the response
is to avoid whatever the thing is. In humans and
sometimes in other animals, but especially in humans, we sometimes
(02:20):
seek out feelings of fear with the caveat that we're
typically safe when we do that.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
So what is morbid curiosity? Give me a definition.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Well, the way that I've defined it is it's an
interest in things that are threatening or potentially dangerous. Sometimes
we're interested in actual threats, you know, if you see
something happening out in the world and it's dangerous or
sometimes we're interested in fictional threats, even things that we're
not sure could exist, like ghosts or aliens or monsters.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
And so your journey into morbid curiosity started relatively early
on with the genre that I found a little bit unexpected.
Tell me what that was.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, I was thinking back, you know, when I started
doing researching this and writing about it, I started thinking
about my own experiences, obviously with things that scared me,
but that I found kind of intriguing. It was actually
a video game. It was a Resident Evil video game
on PlayStation, I think, one that you know, probably I
shouldn't have been playing, and don't know where I got
it from or why I had it, but I do
remember that was a really scary game, especially at the
(03:20):
time and especially for someone who was five or six.
For those that don't know, Resident Evil is a zombie game.
It was kind of one of the original survival zombie
horror games. So you're thrust into this world where there's
a zombie apocalypse and you kind of have to figure
out some puzzles. But as you move through the world,
there are zombies all around, and that's that's really common
to us now, but for video games that was fairly
(03:42):
new back in the nineties and had a fixed point
of view, and so you couldn't you physically couldn't turn
around and look at things like you wanted to look
at them. So actually your perception was limited too, which
is really frightening and really unnerving, especially when you can
hear these zombies kind of groaning and so you know
they're nearby, but you can't actually turn your character and look.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
And just to be clear, you were five years old
when you were playing this.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I was, yeah, five or six, probably I must have
five or six, yeah, And I remember playing the game
and I remember, you know, thinking, oh my gosh, this
is so scary. But what I liked about it is
that there were ways to kind of get away from
the fear for a minute and kind of collect myself.
You could pause the game. Now, pausing the game just
kind of froze it.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
It doesn't really like protect you, but it has let
you literally pause for a second and kind of strategize
or think about what can I do? Right. There were
these safe rooms throughout the house where you could go
to save your game. But those were also places where
you could go and you could kind of strategize and
think about what you're going to do and plan and
sort of collect yourself and sort of go on and
(04:41):
face your fears. And when I started writing about morbid
curiosity and I started hearing about horror fans telling me
that they use horror to kind of face their fears,
I did start thinking about that experience, and I thought,
you know, one byproduct of that might have been that
I was kind of learning to overcome scary situations and
kind of learning how to control feelings of anxiety and
(05:03):
fear in a very safe setting, which I think is
what in the modern world morbid curiosity is really good for.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Your arguments is that this interest in violence, all things
morbid and creepy, it might be a really fundamental part
of our human nature, something that stems from really basic biases.
In your book, you talk about this idea of a
negativity bias and how that is interestingly and importantly universal.
What's a negativity bias and how does it play into
more bid curiosity.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
When I started studying more big curiosity, negativity bias literature
is kind of the first thing I really suck my
teeth into. Because that was what psychologists were talking about.
They were talking about negativity bias, and there was a
lot of research on it, and so I had a
lot of stuff that I could read through to kind
of get a sense of what had been done, what
people had been thinking about. So negativity bias sounds like
it's the fact that things that are negative in our
(05:49):
lives capture our attention and our memory more powerfully than
things that are positive or neutral. My issue with the
framing of negativity bias is that it's a little unclear
to me what it means for something to be negative.
I give the example of my book. If I book
a room at a haunted hotel, I expect to be
like bothered by ghost in my room, Right, I expect
(06:11):
that to happen. I want that to happen. So it's
not really a negative event from my point of view,
But it might be from someone who booked that hotel
not knowing it was haunted. And there's been some work
suggesting that humans are driven by negative events. Their attention
is but it's really threatening events that are what capture
attention even more powerfully, right, And so I think what's
(06:32):
at the core of negativity bias is a potential danger,
potential threat in many cases. So I think threat bias
is kind of at the center of morbid curiosity, which
is maybe part of a broader negativity bias that humans have.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
You told this one study in the book that I
loved about people thinking about and remembering consumer products in
their threat bias. Maybe explain that study here.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, I believe that was a past couple of Yege study.
He does some of the best work on threat bias.
I mean, he laid a lot of the foundation for
this fact that humans seem to be driven by threats.
Their attention is driven by threats. So he in one
of his studies gave people I think it was like shampoo,
and it was descriptions of like side effects of this shampoo.
And some of them were positive, it'll make your hair luscious,
(07:13):
it'll make your hair thick. Some of them were sort
of neutral, like it contains this product, or it lathers
up in this way. And some of them were negative,
like it doesn't always work or may not work for
your hair, and some of them were threatening, like it
will make your hair fall out. He did this kind
of chain study almost like the game Telephone a little bit,
(07:33):
but like where you tell people, here are these eight
facts about this shampoo, some positive, some neutral, some negative,
some threatening. Pick seven of those eight and tell your
friend about it, and then you do the next person
in line. Okay, here's seven facts. Pick six of those.
Tell your friend about those until you get down to
one where you can only tell your friend about one
of those things. And what he found was that the
(07:56):
type of information that made it to the end of
that chain, that like the one that got passed on
the most often, were the threatening types of information. So
this shampoo can burn your scalp or make your hair
fall out. And that kind of makes sense. Like if
I'm going to tell well, l worry about this new
shampoo that I've got, you know, if I have all
this information, am I going to say it lathers this way?
Or am I going to let her know? Hey, and
(08:16):
some people that like made their hair fall out. That's
the kind of information I really want you to know,
because I don't want you to come back to me
later and say, hey, you recommended the shampoo to me
and it bade my hair fall out.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
But it seems like it's not just in terms of
communication that this makes sense. Our curiosity about all things
threatening and our attention towards things threatening seems to make
a lot of evolutionary sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
I mean so I was trained as a biologist for
most of my career, and so when I started thinking
about morbid curiosity, I first looked to animals and I said, Okay,
is there anything in the animal kingdom that looks kind
of like this? Is there anything that would have been
maybe conserved across species? And one of the things I
came across was predator inspection. It's pretty much exactly what
(08:57):
it sounds like. It's when an animal, a prey animal,
inspects or pays attention to a potential predator. So if
I were to ask you what would a zebra do
if it saw a line on the savannah, most people,
reasonably so would say, well, it would run away because
a line wants to eat a zebra, right, But what
you find is that zebras don't always run away when
they see lions. Same thing with gazelles and cheetahs. There
(09:20):
was this two year study with cheetahs and gazelles where
I think it was Claire fits given. She just observed
how gazelles interacted with their natural predator of the cheetah,
over an eighteen month or a two year period, and
what she found was that gazelles would often stop and
actually just inspect cheetahs when the cheetahs weren't actively hunting,
(09:42):
and it wasn't normally distributed across all gazelles, so not
all gazelles did this to the same extent. What she
found were that it was actually the young gazelles that
did it the most. And her explanation for this, which
I think makes a lot of sense and probably applies
to humans and the way that we consume media and entertainment,
is that young gazelles were the most athletics, so they
(10:02):
had the highest chance of getting away. They were the
least at risk, if you will, But they also had
the most to learn. They actually didn't have that many
interactions with predators in their lifetime, and so learning about
a cheetah, what does it look like, where does it
hang out, what does it look like when it's resting,
what does it look like when it's moving, How do
my parents or other group members react when it's doing
this or that? That can teach them a lot that
(10:23):
will serve them for the rest of their life. And
what's interesting is when you look at humans, if you
break down the age ratio of who tends to be,
for example, a horror fan, it tends to peak around
teenage years and young adult years. Now, that doesn't mean
that there aren't little five or six year olds playing
violent or scary video games, and it doesn't mean that
there aren't seventy year olds who still love Georgia Merrow.
(10:45):
It just means that, on average, everybody has this kind
of peak and curiosity around their teenage years and young
adult years. And you see that in a lot of
animals too.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
And the idea is that peak corresponds with when we
need to learn about this stuff. It allows us to
learn some really valuable information that we could use later.
But the difference between a zebra and a human is
that humans have all these other mechanisms to learn without
kind of directly watching on the savannah. Explain how we
can witness and learn about danger in even less costly
ways than other animals.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, you know, if zeebras could make movies or TV shows,
they would absolutely make movies and TV shows about lines, Right,
that's what most of their TV shows and books and
movies will be about. Yeah, if you're an animal that
doesn't have language and transmissible culture, your only way to
learn about threats is really to learn about them firsthand.
And that's a really good way to learn about them
(11:37):
in the sense that you learn the truth. But it's
a bad way to learn about them in the sense
that it's very dangerous. And so you're going to take
fewer opportunities to learn about danger than someone who can
learn about it safely, because you're going to have to
wait for the right moment to learn about it. And
it's really important to capture that right moment. It's important
for that young gazelle to pay attention to the cheetah
(11:58):
when it's the right moment, in the right circumstances, at
the right time. But that's not going to be most
of the time now with humans. You know, let's say
we want to learn about a wolf. We don't have
to go out into the forest to find a wolf
and watch it and see what it does. Right. That
would be one way to learn about a wolf, but
that's a pretty dangerous way to learn about a wolf.
A better way to learn about a wolf is to
ask someone who has had an interaction with the wolf already,
(12:21):
or if there's some communal knowledge about wolves. Create stories
that are, you know, like in the film industry, what
they call psychologically real. The characters are behaving as if
they were real. They have believable actions. So you have
this story about a wolf and what it might do
if you ran into it in the forest in this
situation or this other situation. Maybe it's this wolf with
(12:44):
exaggerated features aware wolf, and those exaggerated features kind of
clue you into what are the really dangerous parts of
the wolf. Big teeth, big claws, fast, they can track you.
And so we can learn about any number of potentially
dangerous predators that maybe we've never even seen through stories.
(13:05):
And then we can take those stories and now we
can write them down, we can create audio visual hallucinations
of them so that they're very rich and detailed. It's
just very, very cheap for us to learn about predators.
And this is true with true crime as well. When
our mind sees this opportunity to learn about a potentially
dangerous person or predator or event and there's no cost
(13:27):
to us, I mean, that seems like a great deal, right,
of course we're going to be drawn to out of
course our curiosity will repeaked.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
We've argued that our curiosity for kind of things that
are scary and morbid falls into four different categories. Let's
kind of walk through each of those categories.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
There seem to be about four categories, four broad categories
of morbid curiosity. So those are the minds of dangerous people.
So this is an interest in sort of the thinking
behind someone who is violent or dangerous. Why are they
doing the things that you're doing, What are their justifications?
How do they get this way? And that's really good
if you know about that for predicting who might be
violent or if you're interacting with someone who is violent.
(14:02):
A second one, which sounds closely related but is actually
a bit different, is an interest in violence itself. So
this is an interest in the act of violence. This
would be you know, what the Romans were experiencing when
they go to the Colisseum, or what you experience if
you go to an MMA match or a boxing match.
It's not an interest in seeing people be hurt, which
I think is a common misconception. It's really just an
interest in the action in the event. Because violent events
(14:25):
are really consequential events. At least historically they've been very
consequential events, and they're important to pay attention to. And
you can learn a lot about the two people who
are interacting, why they're fighting, who's more powerful, who should
maybe be in a coalition with or not being a
coalition with. So you have minds of dangerous people violence,
you have an interest in sort of bodily injuries or
(14:46):
body violations. These are kind of the outcomes of interacting
to something dangerous, whether it's intentional or accidental. So if
I am in a violent fight, or I come across
a dangerous animal in the woods, or have a terrible
fall or accident, as an outsider, I can view someone
who that happened to and see what are the consequences
of this thing, or how dangerous is this event re
(15:09):
And you can kind of get a good gauge of
that by how bad the injury is or what the
injury looks like. It can also tell you something about
you know, as humans, we like to help others and
we like to heal others. And you know, if we
were only disgusted and pushed away from injuries, we wouldn't
be very good healers. So you have those three and
then the final one is one that I wrestled with
a little bit, but the supernatural or paranormal, and I
(15:30):
really I think what this is about is an interest
in things that we don't quite understand. We think are
out there, or we're getting some clues that something is
out there, but we don't have enough information. So this
could be and it doesn't matter whether you believe in
them or not. This could be aliens, it could be ghosts,
it could be demons, it can be anything that kind
of There are hints in our culture that there's something
(15:51):
out there that is intentionally obscuring itself or hiding itself.
You know, you don't often think of demons, ghosts, or
aliens as being friendly. Casper's like an exception to that, right,
Like most of the time when we talk about ghosts,
we talk about malevolent ghosts, or if we talk about
aliens or not usually thinking the aliens are going to
be our friends because they are intentionally hiding themselves. And
(16:13):
then humans, if somebody is being intentionally obscure or hiding themselves,
they usually have poor intentions. So we're kind of putting
those human psychological characteristics onto these other entities. So that's
what the supernatural category is sort of about.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
So I find these four categories really fascinating because I
feel like, if you just look at the entertainment that's
making the most money in the modern day, it's like
picking off each of these different categories, right, Like take
the minds of dangerous people, the first category you mentioned. Right.
As a podcaster, it's just obvious that true crime podcasts
are just like taking off like the data show. They're like,
I think it's the third biggest category of podcasts after
(16:49):
comedy and news. Obviously news is something we did know about,
but the third biggest category of things you want to
know about are like the strange minds of crazy psychopaths.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Also, what's in the news typically things that are violent
and dangerous. Right. There was a study published I think
now it's probably been fifteen or twenty years, but it
looked at categories of news topics throughout time. I think
it was over like a three or four hundred year
period in I think it was nine or ten different societies,
and the top two most common categories across time, across
(17:19):
cultures were death and accidental injury.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Even in news our morbid curiosity is coming back is
so fascinating. I mean, I also think about the things
in entertainment that stick with me, and they tend to
be the things that are like the most glory or
portray some sort of really incredible mind. Use this example
in the book which totally lives rent free in my
brain of watching Ridges of a Lost Arc as a
little kid, And if you've seen Bridges of Lost Arc,
(17:43):
you might remember that there's this part at the end
where the arc comes out and everybody's face starts melting,
and like that literally like sometimes still pops into my dreams,
you know, even though I haven't seen Bridges of Lost
Ark in forever. So like this kind of messing with
bodies and what bodies are capable of just seems to
be well, and that kind of mixes.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
I mean, Rages of the Lost Dark does a great
job of mixing all of these categories. It's got the
supernatural with like the arc and kind of this mysterious
thing that melts your face like a ice cream cone.
And then it has some of the minds of dangerous
people with the Nazis and with the bad guys. But
then it also has bodily injury or bodily violation with
the effects of the supernatural, and so it really does
(18:20):
a good job of, I think, capturing all these different
areas of morbid curiosity, which probably helps make it or
widely enjoyed movie, right, because maybe you don't enjoy one
aspect of that, but maybe you're really into supernatural, or
maybe you don't like the minds of dangerous people, but
you're really into the bodily injuries. I mean, you kind
of get these different features coming at you that trigger
(18:41):
people in different kinds of it would trigger their curiosity
in different kinds of ways.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
I can't handle much violence or gore and anything involving
ghosts or zombies. I'm sleeping with the lights on. But
I do love a good true crime documentary. So maybe
I've got a little morbid curiosity in me after all,
which got me thinking, when does our fascination with spooky
stuff actually begin? Turns out a lot earlier than you
(19:05):
might imagine. After the Break, we'll hear more about our
obsession with spirits, spooks, and psychopaths, and we'll find out
why kids often like to mix a little fear into
their fun. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.
(19:27):
So it seems like our morbid curiosity is just like
all over entertainment, from like movies, from action to horror,
to true crime podcast to like watching MMA and you know,
World Wrestling Federation and all this stuff. But I get
the sense that people are a little bit freaked out
about morbid curiosity, both in themselves and in other people.
And in your book you talk about how often people's
morbid curiosity is used as a scapegoat. Explain what you
(19:49):
mean there.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, well, I think you know that you see this
with serial killers especially, or any kind of you know,
if you watch a true crime documentary, they always go
back and they ask what happened in this individual's childhood
that causes them to be like they are. Now, that's
that's not a bad thing to ask. I don't think
that's an interesting thing. It's it's potentially useful. But the
problem is sometimes you find the one thing that you're
(20:11):
a little biased to think caused it, and then as
soon as that pops up, you say, aha, that's why
they've done it. So, you know, one example that I
give is with Jeffrey Dahmer, So Dahmer serial killer, cannibal horrible,
atrocious crimes. Really had this obsession with one particular horror movie.
I don't even know if he was a horror movie fan,
but he had this obsession with The Exorcist three, which
(20:33):
is kind of an obscure film a little bit, but
it is about a serial killer, and he did kind
of supposedly emulate or try to emulate this villain in
the film. And when people found that out, they went, ah,
of course, he's a cannibalistic serial killer. He watched The
Exorcist three over and over again. Another famous example is
with the Columbine Shooters. You know they played. I don't
(20:55):
remember the exact games. I think it was like some
you know, action game that had some violence in it.
And so when people found that out, because of course
with these kids, they said, oh my god, what could
have caused these kids to do this? And the first
thing that came up was it was violenteo games that
must have caused it. But really, you know, I mean,
there's a lot of things wrong with that. One is
that studies that have looked at school shooters have found
(21:17):
that they actually are less interested in violent video games
than non school shooters, right, and that's of course a
very small sample size against a very very large sample size,
so there's some maybe some problems with that, But it
doesn't seem clear that like all school shooters are obsessed
with violent video games or something. And with Dahmer, I think,
you know, the thing that's funny to me is that
the same more be curiosity that people are blaming for
(21:40):
his crimes is also why those people are interested in
his crimes in the first place and what caused.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Them, Right, that's why they're listening to podcasts about him
and watching Netflix series about him and so on.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yes, exactly, you know, it's a different subcategory of but
it's still this interest in things that are violent or dangerous. Right,
So are some serial killers interested in violence? Yeah? I
would say probably. Right, they are violent individuals, They're probably
going to be interested in violence. But it's shortsighted to
think that because they're interested in violence that caused their violence.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
So the idea is, when the cost of learning about
our thread are low, it's super advantageous to pay attention
to it and become curious about it, which is where
horror movies and podcasts and video games and all this
stuff comes from. We've been talking about how like younger
individuals like the young gazelle's and things like that, are
learning about the lions. But there's also something that animals
do a lot that lets them learn, which is specifically
(22:32):
about play, and so kind of explain what play is
and why it's so powerful for animals evolutionarily, right.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Play has been kind of a tricky topic for people
who study animals because it doesn't have a good definition,
because we're not really sure what play is or what
it's for the best definition that I've come across for
play is that play helps animals safely or more safely
practice either events or rehearse events or interactions that they
might experience later in life. And that makes a lot
(23:00):
of sense, right. So, for example, with dogs, dogs engage
in rough and tumble play. This involves usually them rolling
around kind of chasing each other. This is like what
wolves do as adults. Wolves are chase predators, if you will,
so they don't really stalk their prey. They kind of
once they see them, they chase them. And this is
what if you have a dog at home, this is
what they do. They like could play fetch, they go,
(23:21):
and they chase things, right, Cats also engage in play,
but they engage in a very different kind of play.
So when cats play with each other, they do tend
to kind of stalk each other. They do tend to
kind of hide and jump out at each other, and
this is exactly what cats do to their prey, right
they're stalker predators. So there are these kind of species
specific types of play that you see, and humans we
(23:44):
do a lot of group play. You know, you see
kids on the playground, and like, you can give them
activities to do, but if you just let them do
their own games or come up with their own way
to entertain themselves, oftentimes it will involve some sort of
group play or social dynamics, because that's what humans do.
We engage with each other, and so kind of playing
with that or practicing that is something that you see
(24:06):
among little kids.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
And you've argued that one of the kinds a play
we do is more specifically scary play. Give me some
examples of this in humans.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Humans are a little unique in that they tend to
play a bit longer in life. But of course kids
are still sort of the perfect players, right, Like they
would spend almost all of their time playing if they
could one thing I found really interesting because I don't
study kids. I'm not a development a psychologist, but I
had an experience with kids that just maybe realized, wow,
kids are very morbidly curious. So when I was in
(24:36):
my master's degree, I used to do these science summer
camps for kids, and I was, you know, a young
twenty something, didn't have kids, didn't really know how to
like teach young kids. Turns out they have very short
attention spans and need a lot of time to play. Right,
This was me growing up in Oklahoma. This is a
summer camp. Oklahoma summers are very very hot. Can't always
go outside and play because it's too hot, right, And
(24:59):
so I had to learn how to play games with
kids in this very confined area. And so the game
as a twenty something that I could come up with
that I can think of for large groups of people
was the game Mafia or Werewolf. So if you haven't
heard of this before, they're kind of variations on the
same game. But really the idea is that you have
this group of individuals who live together in a town
(25:20):
and there's some kind of predator, a dangerous person. In
the case of Mafia, it's two mafia members. In the
case of Werewolf, it's two were wolves, and the story
goes each night the town goes to sleep, so the
kids cover their eyes and two individuals who are pre
selected as mafia members come out and they choose someone
to kill, right, and then the town wakes up and
they're told so and so was killed last night by
(25:41):
the mafia. You have to get justice, which humans love
justice as well. You have to figure out who the
killer was. So there's a lot of things in this game. Again,
humans play social games where there's social deception, there's justice.
There's all these things that we do as adults that
you practice. Let's get So. I was playing this game
with the kids and in the game there's a narrator,
and I was playing the part of the narrator, and
(26:02):
because the kids were pretty young, I was trying to
be as pg as I could with a game about
killing people and then hanging them for their So I
would just say, you know, the mafia came out and
they so and so died, and yeah, now you need
to find justice. After a couple of rounds, some of
the kids asked if they could be the narrator. So
I sure, you can be the narrator, so I let
them narrate. Well, it turns out the kids when the
(26:23):
town would go to sleep at night and the mafia
would come out, the mafia were incredibly violent. I mean
there were these horrible stories about how so and so
was murdered and their guts were pulled out, and they
were thrown in the lake and their heads were chopped off.
You know that all these terrible things that were happening,
and the kids loved getting justice for that, they loved
finding someone that they could hang for these terrible crimes,
(26:43):
and so the story just became this horrible scene from
like the worst horror movie that you could imagine. You know. Later,
when I reflected on that, I was like, Wow, kids
are incredibly morbidly curious. And you see this in their
games too, you know, like oftentimes there's a bad guy
and he's out to get you or kill you or
hurts you. Even if you look at games that look
pretty innocent, games like hide and Seek or tag tag
(27:06):
is a game about a predator out trying to get
other people and get them. Hide and Seek is about
a bunch of people hiding from a predator who's out
to get them, right they're playing these games that involve
danger in a safe way and in a way that
they kind of learn how to hide, how to run,
how to interact with people, how to engage in social deception,
or how to spot social deception. There's a lot of
elements of threat or danger in the games that kids
(27:28):
even come up with themselves.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
And this is also true not just in their games,
but in so much kind of kid related culture. I
remember learning things like, you know that song ringing around
the Rosie, what's it about? Like, it's about the plague.
It's about the plague.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
You know.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
You look at Grimm's fairy tales where there's you know,
predators and dangerous things happening all the time. It seems
like we forget that kids are just super morbidly curious,
which raises this question, like, if they're really engaging in
all this stuff, does it actually help them learn or
does it help us as adults learn? And I wanted
to turn to one of the natural experiments that you
had a chance to look at when a real dangerous
(28:03):
thing did happen to us, and that was during the
COVID nineteen pandemic.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Yeah, so in early twenty twenty, I had this great
study set up. This is my first like big study
for my PhD. I curated this cabinet of morbid curiosities,
and I had an eye tracking kit that people were
going to use when they inspected. It was a very
cool study that I've been planning for a long time.
I started participant recruitment in March or February of twenty twenty,
(28:28):
and then like a week later, the school shut down
for the COVID nineteen pandemic, and so, like everyone else,
I kind of had to pivot my research and figure
something else out because now I couldn't do this project
that I had been planning. So I thought, okay, well,
the world is like in a very weird place right now.
We're afraid because there's this new virus we don't know
a lot about that's seemingly like very dangerous. There's this
(28:51):
lockdown that nobody's ever experienced, and we're kind of told
we can't go out and do the things we're normally
able to do. Everything about the world was pretty scary
in one way or another for most people at that time.
And actually there was an editor at News Scientists who
had asked this question to Mike my collaborator Mattias Clays,
and she asked him, are people who are horror fans?
(29:12):
Are they actually doing better right now because they've practiced this.
So Mattias is a professor at Oorros University in Denmark.
He's a horror literature scholar, and he and I have
worked together for many years on different projects relating to horror,
and I, you know, I messaged Mattias and I said,
this is a great idea for a study. Let's do this.
And so we teamed up with some other colleagues of
ours and we came up with what was honestly like
(29:33):
a very simple study. We recruited people and we had
them answer surveys about how morbidly curious they were, We
had them answer surveys about their personalities, we had them
tell us some demographic information, and then we created this
psychological resilience scale that measured positive resilience, which is sort
of how optimistic you are about your future and about
how well you think you can handle the stresses of
(29:55):
the future given what's happening now. And we asked people
what kind of movies they tended to enjoy. Do you
like horror movies or romance movies. Are you watching more
of these now you know? Are you watching fewer of them?
Have you seen any pandemic movies you know in your lifetime.
What we thought we would find was that people who
were horror fans and morbidly curious might be a bit
higher in psychological resilience, and that is what we found
(30:17):
with some weird caveats. So people who were horror movie
fans reported much lower physiological distress during the pandemic, so
they were feeling lower levels of anxiety, depression, sleeplessness. People
who were morbidly curious reported higher levels of positive resilience,
meaning they were more optimistic about their ability to handle
(30:39):
this particular stress going forward. They were optimistic that they
could get through it. And then one interesting finding was
that people who had seen just one pandemic movie that's
all you had to see was one, reported they were
much more prepared for the pandemic and more resilient during it.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
So our morbid curiosity about scary situations might actually give
us a little protection when similar events happen in real life.
But what about the everyday scares that life stress and
work anxiety that so many of us face. Could braving
a film like Psycho or The sh Shining help us
handle those two. When we get back from the break,
Colton will share how flirting with fear might help us
(31:15):
get better at handling our tough emotions. The Happiness Lab
will be right back. I always assumed that scaredy cats
like me usually stick to the comedies and steer clear
of the thrillers, But it turns out it's not that simple.
(31:36):
When people are feeling anxious or stressed out, they're just
as likely, if not more so, to grab a scary
movie and cozy up on the couch for a good fright.
I asked horror expert doctor Colton Scrivner to break down
the research on why that is.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
You would think that people who are anxious or are
scaredy cats are the kind of people who would avoid horror,
and that, again, on its face, makes a lot of sense.
If you're really afraid, why seek out something that's just
going to make you more afraid. When I started thinking
about this topic of like who goes out to see
scary movies? I had that initial thought too, people who
are not anxious, right, because why would they do that?
(32:12):
But then again I thought about it a little differently
a little more, and I thought, well, those are also
the kinds of people who are going to want to
learn about this stuff. They should be actually seeking out information.
And so I dug into the literature to see if
anybody had tested this, and there was one really cool
sort of field study on this. So pre streaming, there
were physical places you would go to rent your movies.
(32:34):
Right you would walk into Blockbuster Family Video. You would
go into the store and they would have movies everywhere
and you would browse and it was it was great.
It was a lot of fun. So these researchers, I
think this was in two thousand and I want to
say seven or eight, they set up like a booth
outside of a Blockbuster Video and as people came into
the store, they surveyed them on their mood. So how
are they feeling? And what these researchers wanted to know
(32:56):
was how does your mood affect the kind of entertainment
that you want to consume. So they sat outside this
Blockbuster store. People came in and they would ask them,
how nervous are you feeling, how angry are you feeling,
how happy are you feeling? And you know, reasonably, so
they assumed that people who were anxious would probably seek
out something kind of happy to help them get into
(33:16):
a better mood. People who were feeling bored might seek
you out an action movie. So the idea was like,
you would kind of seek the opposite of what you
were feeling in order to get you to this state
that you wanted to be in. So people would go
in the store and they would browse, they would pick
their movies, and they would come out, and when they
came out, the researchers would say, hey, can you tell
us what kind of movie? What movies did you get?
And then they would note down the genre of the movie.
(33:39):
And what they found, at least for horror, was the
exact opposite of what they thought. So the people who
came in feeling anxious and nervous, those were the people
most likely to watch a horror movie.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
So those findings violate all my intuitions. But they also
raise this really they also raise this really interesting question,
which is that like, maybe scary movies actually can help
us become less anxious. And so how did researchers wind
up testing that?
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Well, when I started looking into this, when I started
looking into okay, what does it mean that anxious people
sometimes seek out scary movies. There wasn't much in the literature,
and so I actually went to like Reddit threads and
online articles, op eds, and magazines because people were talking
about this. A lot real people in the world were
talking about this, but academics were not, And a lot
(34:26):
of people would talk about how they accidentally discovered that
when they were feeling anxious. Feel like, these are people
who have oftentimes like clinical anxiety, or maybe they were
just having a really anxious time in their life. They
would feel this like strange urge to turn on something scary,
even if they were not horror fans, even if they
had never been horror fans, and they discovered that it
(34:48):
kind of helped them calm down or get through that.
And I thought that was super intriguing, and it kind
of matched up with this blockbuster study. So I thought, Okay,
there's got to be a way to do an academic
study on this. So we created this survey that again
had a bunch of different statements about why people like
horror moves, and we collected these from all over the
(35:08):
internet and magazines and you know, just people talking about
why they like horror movies. And what we found were
that horror fans seem to be lumped into kind of
three types, right, and these aren't mutually exclusive with each other,
but there's sort of three broad types. There's the adrenaline
junkie who does like horror because it kind of makes
them feel alive, and this is kind of the classic
psychological explanation for why people like scary things that are playful,
(35:33):
same reason that they enjoy roller coaster or skydiving or
any other high adrenaline activity. But there's another group that
we called the white knucklers because you're just like watching
the movie with your fists clinch. These are people who
are truly afraid, like very afraid of what's going on,
but they still choose to do it. So those people
were really interesting to us because we wanted to know, like,
why are you doing this if you're truly afraid of it?
(35:53):
And then we found this third group that we didn't
necessarily expect to find, and we decided to call them
the dark copers because these people essentially were telling us
that they use scary things to help them get through
difficult times in their life. That could be depression, it
could be anxiety, it could be kind of thinking about
existential problems. And so at the time, I was doing
(36:14):
these sort of yearly or annual haunted house studies in
Denmark with my collaborator Mattias. So there's this haunted attraction
like you go to in Halloween, right, a haunted house
near or who's where Mattias was based, and so I
would go visit him for a few weeks and we
would actually go to this haunted house and kind of
like the Blockbuster study, we would set up this big
research tent outside the haunted house where people would take
(36:37):
surveys or we would strap them up to heart rate monitors,
and we wanted to kind of know like, how are
these people playing with fear? How are they engaging in
scary play in the real world. So we had these
three groups identified, we had the survey created, we took
it to the haunted house. We had people take the
survey before they went in, and then when they came out,
we asked them what do you feel like you got
(36:57):
out of this experience, Like did you get a mood boost,
do you feel like you learned something about yourself? Do
you feel like you've kind of developed as an individual
like you would in therapy or something. And what we
found were that there were distinct benefits to these different
kinds of horror fans. So people who were adrenaline junkies,
they mostly did like it because they got the mood boost.
They didn't say that they learned anything about themselves. They
(37:19):
didn't say that they developed as a person. They just
kind of enjoyed the experience. But what was interesting is
that the adrenaline junkies were a really small portion of
our participants. The other probably two thirds to the people
identified based on our survey as white knucklers or dark copers.
And these people said that they learned something about themselves
and kind of developed as a person. And when you
(37:40):
ask them, you know, what do you mean by that,
they would say things like I learned the boundaries of
my fear, kind of like what I could handle them,
what I can't. I learned how I would react in
this like high intensity scary situation that I've never been
in it before. Some people even explicitly would say, now
I know what I need to do better if I'm
ever in a situation that's scary like this again. And
usually they were talking not about the literal situation like
(38:02):
a man in a pig mask chasing you with the chainsaw.
But they were talking about the emotional situation, how do
I handle these emotions that are overwhelmingly negative in many ways?
Speaker 1 (38:12):
And this relates to a few things that we talk
about a lot in this podcast.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
One is this idea that if you want to get
good at regulating your emotions, whether that's sadness or in
this case, fear, you actually have to practice doing that.
And our instinct isn't to practice regulating our emotions, it's
to avoid emotions all the time, right, And so it
seems like what your participants were doing in this case,
or at least kind of ones that identified as white
knucklers or dark copers, they use the haunted house experience
(38:35):
and the anxiety that came up there to like practice
a little bit coping. Another reason I love your studies
and it fits with the kind of stuff that we
talk about on the podcast, is that we often talk
about the problem of suppressing our emotions. Right when we're
feeling anxious, our move is like, oh, shut it off,
pretend it's not happening. But a lot of the research
suggests that the way you get through a negative emotion
like anxieties to actually feel it, and maybe what better
(38:57):
way to feel it than to like really ramp it
up in some like incredibly intense haunted house, safe and
in a safe way exactly Again.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
It kind of goes back to this idea of play.
I think this is just an example of scary play.
And if the point of play is to rehearse situations, well,
situations can be literal. They can be I need to
know how to run, or I need to know how to,
like if I'm disoriented, how to get away. Or they
can be more psychological or emotional. They can be if
I'm feeling this, how do I recenter myself a little
(39:26):
bit and get through this.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
So, if someone's hearing all these benefits that your haunted
house scoers got out of scary play, and they're curious
about morbid curiosity, what would be some suggestions about dipping
their feet in, especially if they're somebody who hasn't engaged
in a lot of this scary play so far.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
The common mistake that I hear is that people think
they need to go out and do like the scariest
thing that they could imagine. That's the wrong way to
do it. Right, because of course that's going to be
too much. And that's usually what you hear if you
talk to adults and you say, you know, do you
like horror movies? And if they say no, you ask
them why. Usually the answer is, oh, I watched one
when I was a kid. They was too scary for me,
and I just haven't been able to watch them since.
(40:03):
But what's interesting is a lot of the people who
as adults become horror fans. And this happened to COVID
a lot actually, or had its best two years in
history at the box office in twenty twenty and twenty
twenty one. So people were seeking out these like scary
experiences for the first time, many of them, and realizing,
maybe I can enjoy this. But yeah, I think the
(40:24):
mistake that people make is that they think they should
seek out something really scary that's going to terrify them.
What you should do is exactly what developmental psychologists tell
us to do the time, which is kind of go
to the edge of what you're able to do, right,
the edge of what you can handle. And that's different
for everybody, you know. We did this study at the
Hunted House where we strap people up with heart rate monitors,
(40:44):
and we wanted to know, is there kind of like
a sweet spot of fear? Is there this optimal experience
is a Goldilock zone, because that's true for a lot
of things. It's true for learning, it's true for flow
states are we're really productive, and so we thought, well,
maybe it's true for fear too, and that doesn't seem
to be true. What we found in this study was
that there's a sweet spot. And the sweet spot is
(41:04):
a little different for everybody, but it does tend to
be kind of like if you imagine a one to
ten scale, it's like about a seven out of ten.
When they were too afraid, their heart rate was too erratic,
they weren't having as good of a time. When it
was about seven out of ten on the max, that's
when they were really having the best time, having the
most fun. And so I think what you should do
if you're trying to get into scary entertainment and you're
(41:25):
curious that maybe this could help you. Start with the
easy stuff, Start with stuff you know you can handle, right,
and then kind of just go from there and edge
up further and further until you get to something that
is kind of scary, and you do have to practice
that emotion regulation. You're kind of in your goldilock zone.
You're in your sweet spot. But eventually your sweet spot
is going to move right. You're going to get better
at that, You're going to be able to handle something more.
And I think this is what a lot of people
(41:47):
are afraid of when it comes to horror movies. They
argue that, oh, well, it desensitizes you to violence, or
it desensitizes you too these things. And I think it
does desensitize you, but not to violence per se, not
to real violence. It desensitizes you a little bit to
your anxiety and to your fear, and it allows you
to actually handle higher doses.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
This makes me very comforted that we're starting out with
baby steps into morbid curious. Someone who's really afraid of
this stuff.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
No, I need. I need to write a my Baby's
First Morbidly Curious Experience book.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
That's definitely the one that I need. My husband and
I are inspired by your book. I've been trying to
watch more horror movies and thrillers and sometimes I'm like,
time out, this is too much. We're gonna hit pause
on this. We're going to watch it again tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
That's what you should be doing. Yeah, It's like if
it's too much, like pause for a second, you know,
it's okay to like cover your eyes and portions. Those
are emotion regulation skills. Those are tactics, right, Like when
people cover their eyes and a scary scene, they're regulating
their anxiety and their fear, right, and over time they
might get a little better at that. They do have
to kind of like push yourself to peak, right, You
kind of have to like look through your fingers a
little bit.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
I'm a big fan of the turtleneck in horror movies
and glory movies. I recently watched The Substance with Demi Moore.
Great films, but a lot but the turtleneck. You can
just kind of cover up your eyes, peak with one eye,
pull it back up, put down.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
But those are skills, right, That's the kind of thing
I might need to take in a different form into
a situation that's really anxiety provoking or really scary in
my normal life.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Yeah. Yeah, and eventually you learn to take more cognitive
approaches to emotion regulation, right. Those are like physical things
you can do. You can turn the lights on you
can turn the sound down, you can cover your eyes
and scary scenes, but you also are inherently practicing cognitive
emotion regulation skills, cognitive reframing. You know, telling yourself how
extreme I feel right now doesn't match like what's really happening,
(43:29):
So you are practicing those cognitive skills as well. So
in order to get like the optimal amount of fun,
people kind of regulate their fear both up and down.
So sometimes they want to be more afraid, and so
they kind of get into it really and let themselves
scream and like look at the actors and look at
the scary things, and sometimes they cover their eyes, and
sometimes they tell themselves it's not real. And it's all
in this attempt to regulate how afraid you are, how
(43:53):
anxious you're feeling, so that you can have the most fun.
But of course the side effect of that is you're
practicing regulating your emotions both up and down, and so
you have more kind of just mastery in general over
those negative emotions that we tend to.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Avoid so safely. Enjoying a bunch of psychopaths and monsters
may not only get your blood pumping in the moment,
it may also make you a little bit more resilient
in the long run. That's a pretty compelling reason to
dive a little deeper into spooky season this year. Now,
I'm not quite willing to give up my turtleneck or
keep my finger off the pause button, But this Halloween,
(44:26):
I think I'm finally ready to take some baby steps
towards embracing my inner scream. Queen to my fellow scaredy cats,
let me know if you decide to do the same.
In the name of a happier Halloween, I challenge all
of us to seek out a bit more spooky delight.
The Happiness Lab will be on a short break for
the next few weeks, but we'll be back soon with
(44:46):
more holiday related episodes, just in time for the season
of gift giving, So be sure to swing back for
more episodes of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie
Santo's
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