Getting a Thrill From Fear Should Be Counter-Intuitive
Yet, fear can be exciting, so there must be some benefit to intentionally scaring ourselves
Hiya!
From time to time, especially around Halloween, I enjoy indulging in some good ol’ self-induced fear. Bring on the scary movies and haunted houses. Let’s check out that corn maze with the Freddie Krugers, Jasons, and clowns lurking around every corner. Yet, fear is meant to protect us from danger, fake or not, so why oh why do we put ourselves through such things?
To any thrill seekers or horror fans, the reason is obvious. There’s just something exciting about being scared. Our hearts pound in our chests, our adrenaline skyrockets, and every sense is on high alert. Then, once we remember we’re safe, sweet relief floods our system, and we feel euphoric for simply being alive. But now scientists think there’s more to it.
Fear the Survival Skill
We don’t need scientific evidence to understand the basic principles of why fear works so well as a survival skill. Fear keeps us alive by creating a strong emotional response to avoid people, places, or things that threaten our physical or mental health. Curiosity may lead us into a dangerous situation, but fear will ensure we don’t repeat the mistake. However, science can tell us much more about how fear works.
Protected deep in the center of your brain is an almond-shaped bundle of neurons called the amygdala, which controls your fear response. When you’re scared, your amygdala sends distress signals to your hypothalamus, which triggers your adrenal cortical and sympathetic nervous systems, producing a flash flood of hormones, activating your fight, flight, or freeze stress response.
Hormones like adrenaline increase your body’s alertness by speeding up your heart and diverting blood from your core to the muscles in your limbs in case you need to fight or run. Your breath quickens, which sends oxygen to your brain, and cortisol raises your blood pressure. Blood vessels around your vital organs dilate to deliver an influx of fresh nutrients and oxygen, making you ready to take on whatever situation you’re facing.
The brain needs all the fresh oxygen it can get from your increased breathing because it’s busy triggering two pathways that determine how you react to the threat. The first pathway is also the fastest. It sends information to your sensor thalamus and amygdala, which triggers your initial immediate reaction to the danger.
The second pathway is longer and takes a roundabout way, delivering information from your thalamus to your cortex — the brain’s most visible and outer layer associated with consciousness, memory, and reasoning. This pathway allows you to evaluate whether the danger is real and respond accordingly.
If it is real, more brain regions are activated to initiate a full-body response to the danger, like cutting off your sensory perception of pain while you escape or fight for your life.
Fear is an Emotion
Beyond being a survival skill, fear is an emotion, which means it’s complicated and multifaceted. But it’s also an excellent tool. People have used scary stories to teach children about predators or other dangers they may encounter, likely since language evolved.
Even today, there are entire genres of movies and shows dedicated to exposing society’s collective fears — think HBO’s Westworld, which ran from 2016 to 2022, or the murderous AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey made back in 1968.
Enjoying a scary movie about something that won’t likely happen in our lifetimes is one thing, but research reported that in March 2020, during the height of the pandemic panic, people were downloading the 2011 movie Contagion in droves — which is a movie about, you guessed it, a deadly pandemic.
So, what’s our deal? Why would we intentionally seek out films about something so terrifying and real at the time? Well, an associate professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University named Marc Malmdorf-Andersen and his colleagues think the answer relates to our ancient ancestors’ method of using fear as a learning tool.
For instance, horror movies help us learn how to manage uncertain situations. After all, if there’s one thing the brain doesn’t like, it’s being ill-prepared for the future.
Always Learning
Playing isn’t just childish fun and games. It’s a powerful learning method that just happens to be so simple that children use it. We don’t leave the method behind in childhood, though, but should and do use it throughout our lives. And it turns out that watching scary movies or walking through haunted houses are yet another example of learning through play.
Malmdorf-Andersen, who researches brain operations involved in play and learning, explains in the Guardian:
“Spending time in these fictional realms can almost be thought of as an opportunity to draft up your own instruction book for worst-case scenarios.”
Malmdorf-Andersen believes fear can be enjoyable when we view it as a form of play and that it could teach us how to navigate new and uncertain situations we may find ourselves in. He states in the same article:
“It is possible that recreational forms of fear in general can help improve emotion regulation and coping skills.” […] “In much the same way, children’s play is characterised by seeking out moderate amounts of uncertainty, moderate surprises, in an effort to make sense of them.”
Other research, this time from Exeter University, seems to support Malmdorf-Andersen’s perspective. The researchers found that when children engage in play involving fear and risk, it can actually work as a protective element against anxiety.
Additionally, the research I mentioned earlier that discovered an influx of people downloading the movie Contagion also found that horror fans were more psychologically resilient than people who don’t enjoy watching scary movies.
The word “moderate” in Malmdorf-Andersen’s quote above is also the key between experiencing fear in a fun way and being genuinely terrified.
Walking the Line
Malmdorf-Andersen and his colleagues at Aarhus University’s Recreational Fear Lab wanted to understand the connection between enjoyment and fear better, so they studied groups of volunteers as they walked through a haunted house visitor attraction full of chainsaw-wielding maniacs, brain-hungry zombies, and cannibalistic murderers.
The researchers asked the volunteers how they felt at certain times but also monitored their heart rates and filmed them as they progressed through the house. Malmdorf-Andersen discusses one setup in particular:
“At Dystopia Haunted House there are about 70-100 scare actors each night, and a large special-effects department. They challenge their guests on a lot of different levels, [such as] disgust, fear, jump scare, unease, being alone, being in the dark, [and] claustrophobia.”
Malmdorf-Andersen’s research, published in March 2023, indicates that we humans like being scared, but not that scared. We prefer to dip a toe beyond our safe and normal physiological state rather than cannonball beyond our comfort zone. And, of course, the line is different for everyone.
Living in too much fear can lead to chronic stress and even cognitive dysfunction. As seen by the roughly 275 million people worldwide who suffer from an anxiety disorder, or the 3 in every 50 American adults who experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD.) The point is, we all have a unique sense of what is or isn’t scary. It’s a fine line between harmless fun and a genuine trigger or terrifying event.
Perspective Shift
Usually, we picture technology when we think of human ingenuity. We credit our knowledge of math, language, and rationality to many of our accomplishments. But I think the way we use fear could be one of the most ingenious things we’ve done.
Fear is a primal emotional response that likely evolved for the sole purpose of keeping us alive. Yet, over hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of years, we’ve taken this part of ourselves and upcycled it several times over.
We’ve turned it into a weapon by invoking fear in our enemies. We use it to manipulate ourselves and others. But we also find ways to make fear exciting and use it as a learning tool — not just so we stay alive but so generations after us do, too.
What else might we become capable of if we applied similar efforts to our other emotions?
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Cool, Katrina. You might also be interested in some studies suggesting that introverts and extroverts differ in their desire to be frightened. Something about extroverted brains running on adrenaline while introverts prefer acetylcholine. I’m an introvert who doesn’t like horror films or scary rides.