Haunted house study sheds light on how human body responds to threats

Enlarge / Caltech researchers conducted a study on how the body responds to threats in conjunction with The 17th Door haunted house experience in Orange County, California. (credit: YouTube/17th Door)

The 17th Door haunted house experience has become a fixture of the annual Halloween fright scene in Orange County, California, attracting thousands of scare seekers since it opened in 2014. And now it's contributing to science, specifically our understanding of how the human body responds to threats differently depending on certain factors, according to a recent paper published in the journal Psychological Science.

As we've reported previously, human beings 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." This new study focuses less on recreational fear specifically and more on gaining a better understanding of the biological systems that are involved with different fear responses in humans, according to lead author Sarah Tashjian, a postdoc in psychology at Caltech.

Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University, author of Why Horror Seduces, conducted his own 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 2020 study from Clasen's lab found that the scare factor has to be just right in order to achieve that crucial mixed stated (a "Goldilocks zone" or "sweet spot" of subjective enjoyment). Clasen's core hypothesis is that horror exploits the evolved fear system.

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