Haunted houses can be chilling delights, but a new study accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science shows that to be truly enjoyable, they should not be too terrifying or too tame.
Fear is typically viewed as a negative emotion, an adverse reaction to keep us on our toes with regard to potential dangers in our environment. But human beings also tend to seek out scary movies, horror novels, or haunted houses—and not just during the Halloween season. This tendency has been dubbed "recreational fear" in the academic literature: a "mixed emotional experience of fear and enjoyment." But the scare factor has to be just right in order to achieve that mixed state, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science that correlates this "Goldilocks zone" of subjective enjoyment with a telltale range of heart-rate fluctuations.
“By investigating how humans derive pleasure from fear, we find that there seems to be a ‘sweet spot’ where enjoyment is maximized,” said co-author Marc Malmdorf Andersen, a researcher at the Interacting Minds Center at Denmark’s Aarhus University. “Our study provides some of the first empirical evidence on the relationship between fear, enjoyment, and physical arousal in recreational forms of fear.”
This is just the latest development in a course of research spearheaded by Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University, another co-author, and the author of Why Horror Seduces. For instance, Clasen has examined the dominant personality traits of horror fans. (They tend to score highly on openness to experience, also called intellect imagination.) And last year we reported on his investigation of two different fear-regulation strategies employed by subjects participating in a Danish haunted house: "adrenaline junkies," who lean into the fear, and "white-knucklers," who try to tamp down their fear. A third study still in progress will examine the relationship between fear and memory.
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