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. 2020 Dec;31(12):1497-1510.
doi: 10.1177/0956797620972116. Epub 2020 Nov 2.

Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror

Marc Malmdorf Andersen  1   2 , Uffe Schjoedt  1   2 , Henry Price  3   4 , Fernando E Rosas  4   5   6 , Coltan Scrivner  7   8 , Mathias Clasen  1   9
Affiliations

Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror

Marc Malmdorf Andersen et al. Psychol Sci. 2020 Dec.

Abstract

Haunted attractions are illustrative examples of recreational fear in which people voluntarily seek out frightening experiences in pursuit of enjoyment. We present findings from a field study at a haunted-house attraction where visitors between the ages of 12 and 57 years (N = 110) were equipped with heart rate monitors, video-recorded at peak scare points during the attraction, and asked to report on their experience. Our results show that enjoyment has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with fear across repeated self-reported measures. Moreover, results from physiological data demonstrate that the experience of being frightened is a linear function of large-scale heart rate fluctuations, whereas there is an inverted-U-shaped relationship between participant enjoyment and small-scale heart rate fluctuations. These results suggest that enjoyment is related to forms of arousal dynamics that are "just right." These findings shed light on how fear and enjoyment can coexist in recreational horror.

Keywords: arousal; enjoyment; fear; heart rate; horror; open data; open materials; play.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Photos from the haunted-house attraction: a woman running from “Mr. Piggy” at Jump-Scare Location 2 (left) and zombies at Jump-Scare Location 3 (right). Photos were taken by Tina Liv.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Freeze-frames from surveillance-camera footage at Jump-Scare Location 1, where haunted-house guests encountered a mad scientist, and a concealed zombie delivered a jump scare. The haunted-house guests shown in these images are research assistants from the study.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Heart rate data (beats per minute [BPM]). Large- and small-scale components were extracted from an original heart rate signal (top) via low-pass (middle) and band-pass (bottom) filtering, respectively.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Scatterplot showing the relation between site-specific self-reported enjoyment and site-specific self-reported fear, after the effects of fixed and random factors are removed. The blue line shows the best-fitting regression, and the gray band is the 95% confidence interval.
Fig. 5.
Fig. 5.
Scatterplots showing the relation between self-reported fear and large-scale heart rate (HR) fluctuations (left) and small-scale HR fluctuations (right). The blue lines show the best-fitting regressions, and the gray bands are 95% confidence intervals.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

  • The Paradox of Pleasurable Fear.
    Bloom P. Bloom P. Trends Cogn Sci. 2021 Feb;25(2):93-94. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2020.12.001. Epub 2020 Dec 15. Trends Cogn Sci. 2021. PMID: 33339736

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