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Fear gets a bad rap. It’s a so-called negative emotion, one that supposedly stands between us and our dreams. But fear is also the engine in a whole range of pleasurable activities and behaviors — which inspire what we can call recreational fear.
Once you start looking for it, you’ll find recreational fear everywhere. From an early age, humans love being jump-scared by caregivers (peek-a-boo!). Young humans are drawn to scary stories, perform daredevil tricks, ride rollercoasters and play horror video games. Indeed, most of us never quite lose our peculiar attraction to recreational fear — even if we eschew slasher flicks.
How come?
One hypothesis: Recreational fear is play behavior, which is widespread in the animal kingdom and ubiquitous among humans. When an organism plays, it learns skills and develops survival strategies. Playfighting kittens train their ability to hold their own in a hostile encounter, but with little risk and low cost, compared to the real thing. Same with humans. When we engage in recreational fear activities specifically, from peek-a-boo to horror movie watching, we challenge our limits, and we learn about our own physiological and psychological responses to stress. In other words, recreational fear might actually be good for us.
To investigate all of this, my colleagues and I established the Recreational Fear Lab, a research center at Aarhus University in Denmark. We do lab work, surveys and empirical studies to understand this widespread but scientifically understudied psychological phenomenon.
In one ambitious research project, led by my colleague Marc Malmdorf Andersen, we investigated the experiences of guests at a very frightening haunted house — Dystopia Haunted House in Denmark. We mounted surveillance cameras in the house’s scariest rooms, strapped participants with heart rate monitors and distributed questionnaires to understand how guests responded to, for example, a chainsaw-wielding pig man chasing them down a dark corridor.
We wanted to delve deeply into the relationship between fear and enjoyment. You might think that the relationship is linear — the more fear, the better. But when we plotted the actual relationship between fear and enjoyment, it looked like an upside-down U. In other words, when people go to a haunted attraction, they don’t want too little fear (boring), and they don’t want too much fear (unpleasant). Instead, they want to hit the “sweet spot of fear.”
That doesn’t just go for high-intensity haunted attractions. When you hurtle a kid into the air, you don’t want it to be too tame or too wild; when teenagers joyride their bikes, they need just the right amount of tummy-tickling arousal.
What are the benefits of tickling fear’s sweet spot? In several studies of the psychological and social effects of engagement with recreational fear, people have shown an ability to cope with stress and anxiety. One study — led by my colleague Coltan Scrivner — found that people who watch many horror movies exhibited better psychological resilience during the first COVID-19 lockdown than people who stay away from scary movies. Presumably, the horror hounds have trained their ability to regulate their own fear by playing with it.
We know from another Dystopia Haunted House study that people actively use a range of coping strategies to regulate their fear levels in pursuit of the sweet spot, and it makes sense that we get better at using those strategies through practice.
You can think of recreational fear as a kind of mental jungle gym where you prepare for the real thing or as a kind of fear inoculation. A small dose of fear galvanizes the organism for the big dose that life throws at it sooner or later. So even though fear itself may be unpleasant, recreational fear is not only fun — it may be good for us.
My colleagues and I even have preliminary results to suggest that some people with mental health issues, such as anxiety disorder and depression, get relief from recreational horror. Maybe it’s about escaping anhedonia — emotional flatlining — momentarily, and maybe it’s about playing with troublesome emotions in a controllable context. For fear to be fun, you need to feel not only that the levels are just-so, but that you are in relative control of the experience.
With research findings such as these in mind, we should maybe think twice about shielding kids and young people too zealously from playful forms of fear. They’ll find fear sooner or later, and they will be better equipped if they’ve at least pretended to be there before.
Mathias Clasen is an associate professor in literature and media and director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of “Why Horror Seduces” and “A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies.” This article was written for Zócalo Public Square.
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