Mind / Psychology
WHY DO WE LIKE BEING SCARED WHEN WE KNOW WE ARE SAFE?
Fear can be unpleasant and fun at the same time, especially when the danger is controlled. A haunted house is fear with an exit sign.
Fear can be unpleasant and fun at the same time, especially when the danger is controlled. A haunted house is fear with an exit sign.
WHY DO WE LIKE BEING SCARED WHEN WE KNOW WE ARE SAFE?
Fear can be unpleasant and fun at the same time, especially when the danger is controlled. A haunted house is fear with an exit sign.
In a 2020 field study at a haunted attraction, Marc Malmdorf Andersen and colleagues studied 110 visitors who wore heart-rate monitors and rated their experience. The study, published in Psychological Science, found an inverted-U relationship between fear and enjoyment: enjoyment was highest at a middle level of fear.
Too little was boring. Too much was unpleasant. Somewhere in between was fun.
That is the trick of recreational fear: your body can produce real arousal while your mind still knows this is contained, this will end, and I chose to be here. Fear becomes playable.
Horror works because the body is allowed to react without the situation becoming truly dangerous. In this haunted-attraction study, a middle zone appeared to be the sweet spot. That finding describes this experience, not a universal amount of fear everybody should enjoy.
The haunted house should scare you, not ruin your evening.
“The haunted house should scare you, not ruin your evening.”