Where Is That Fine Line Between Terror and Delight?

Unique among the many puzzling things about human beings is our perverse attraction to the danger of extreme sports and our willingness to pay good money to expose ourselves to horror movies, commercial haunted houses, and other scary things.

Source: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock

Why Do We Intentionally Scare Oursleves?

I have written before about how we might scare ourselves on purpose because it is an adaptive behavior that prepares us for dealing with possible future threats.

In the safety of a movie theater, watching others deal with serial killers or paranormal threats allows us to mentally rehearse strategies that we might use if we would ever find ourselves in a similar situation. With such films, it is not at all uncommon to hear gasps from the audience as a character begins to open the door to that room or to hide in a very inopportune place. And so, we may feel better prepared for frightening encounters because we have seen what happens to others in harrowing circumstances.

Similarly, walking through a commercial haunted house can provide relevant feedback about ourselves. It might be useful to know which types of things are scary to us and which are not, and examining our emotional reactions to unsettling experiences may help us gauge our level of preparedness for dealing with terrifying unexpected situations. This, in turn, might tell us which strategies might work best for us if such an eerie real-life encounter should ever occur.

Recreational Fear?

The mysterious allure of fear and horror was elegantly explored in a recent study by a team of researchers led by Marc Malmdorf Andersen from Aarhus University in Denmark. These researchers employed the concept of “Recreational Fear” to describe how humans could possibly experience fear as enjoyable. They describe recreational fear as a form of play that combines the perfect mix of fear, enjoyment, and surprise. Experiencing just the right dose of each of these emotions appears to be almost addictive to a great many people.

This way of thinking about recreational fear is consistent with what we already know about other forms of play. Most species of mammals play, and the more social the species, the more important play becomes. The playfulness of young primates in particular is well-documented, and the tendency of young male primates to enjoy play fighting and for young female primates to engage in play parenting is very much in line with the “scaffolding” view of play. The short explanation of this take on play is that it is an irresistibly entertaining opportunity for young animals to practice skills that will become important for their success as adults.

Reading an account of recreational fear as play immediately triggered fond memories of how much my own children, and later my granddaughter, enjoyed playing “monster games” with me where I would hide from them and then jump out and chase them when they came looking for me.

Into the Haunted House

Andersen and his colleagues investigated the relationship between fear and enjoyment in a study conducted at the Dystopia Haunted House, a popular Danish scare attraction. They equipped 110 visitors to the haunted house with small, lightweight heart-rate monitors. These brave volunteers filled out questionnaires before and after their scare experience to assess their motivations for going through the house, as well as their expectations and actual experiences of joy, surprise, and fear. They were also video-recorded at three key locations inside the haunted house to monitor their verbal and nonverbal emotional responses.

Specifically, the researchers recorded their reactions to being chased by a very large man with a bloody butcher’s apron and a grotesque pig’s mask or by being startled by zombies lurching out of hiding.

The participants in this study reported high levels of both enjoyment and fear, although women overall registered higher levels of fear and lower levels of enjoyment than did men.

There was a clear “Inverted U” shaped relationship between the level of an individual’s fear and his or her level of enjoyment. Increasing the amount of fear also increased the amount of enjoyment up to a certain point, beyond which enjoyment declined as the fear became more intense. In other words, there was a “sweet spot” that provided the optimal experience of recreational fear.

The volunteers heart rates also predicted emotional experiences in the haunted house. Large, sudden elevations from the baseline was a strong predictor of fear, but smaller unexpected changes predicted enjoyment. It appears that we enjoy “Goldilocks” arousal changes that are not too small and not too large, but “just right.”

In short, the concept of “recreational fear” offers a very promising new direction for understanding the perplexing balancing act between scaring ourselves and enjoying ourselves when we engage in “horror play” as adults.