As Halloween approaches, many people race to haunted houses and begin horror movie marathons while others stay far away from horror.
Ever wonder why scary stories might excite you while others shy away from them?
What is it we enjoy so much about shivers down our spines, goosebumps on our skin, the anxiety creeping up inside of us when we're spooked?
Tara Perreault, a University of South Florida psychology doctoral student, has been studying how fear bonds people. Her research includes reactions in haunted houses and why people scream.
When we watch horror movies, a fight-or-flight instinct kicks in, as well as a dopamine hit, because we are watching in a safe environment with other people, she said during a recent interview on WUSF's "Florida Matters Live & Local."
“There’s been numerous studies that show that your heart rates will actually synchronize with the people around you when you’re watching scary movies,” Perrault said.
The following interview transcript was lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Do we need a little bit of fear in our lives that we’re not getting in the cloister of modern life?
In our ancestral environments, we were always running from predators. We were always needing to keep safe, and our daily life now is pretty boring for the most part. We get up, we go to work, we do the same thing day in and day out. So sometimes we need that little bit of extra fear or anxiety or dread to keep our system primed for when we might actually need it.
What is happening to our brains when we experience fear?
When we're first in an environment where we're scared, our fight-or-flight system kicks in, which is the amygdala sounding the alarm. Our heart races, blood pumps to our large muscle groups, and then we either get ready to fight or flee.
And there's also that situation when you're looking at vulnerability and formidability. So we're looking at the threat: Can I run from this? Can I fight it? What should my next reaction be?
Why might people prefer true crime documentaries as opposed to a fictional horror movie? Why doesn’t true crime make us more paranoid or scared?
I think a lot of that has to do with being prepared. These things have actually happened, so these are threats you need to simulate because most likely someone isn't going to come chasing us with a chainsaw like they would at a haunted house. But some of these other true crime stories, there is that potential of it being real in our life. While that potential is probably pretty low, it is still a real life story, and we tend to pay a little bit more attention to things that are real.
What kind of reactions or tension is created when hearing or seeing a real horror story being played out?
That relates to the different types of people that consume those types of stories. You've got the people that are the thrill-seekers that just want the biggest and scariest stories, and then you've got the other types of people that want the resolution. They are called dark copers, and they want to know the full story and how it ended. And for another set of people, they like to know that there was a clean resolution. So in the space of true crime, they want to know that person was caught, that person paid and they're behind bars.
What is the difference between experiencing fear in a controlled environment and actual real fear in a real life setting?
There's a lot of similarities, and there's a lot of differences. Fear is the same, but it's the situation that makes it safe, and the dopamine that you get afterward when you realize you're in a safe environment. But when you look specifically at heart rate, those large fluctuations in your heart rate going through a haunted house, you could hit easily 180 beats per minute. But there's also this small scale fluctuation, and that small scale fluctuation from those big jumps is where the fun lives. So it's really interesting that you can see whether it's pure terror or fear and fun mixed together by just looking at heart rate.
Tell us more about the research group that you were apart of that built a haunted house to study fear and it brought people closer together?
It was the Fear Garden up in Gainesville. And the first year, it was in a wedding tent, and there was a lot of sensory deprivation. We blindfolded participants. We had a scary podcast story playing in headphones and led people around in ropes with uneven floors and a whole bunch of other tactile types of stimulations.
And then we moved to a warehouse for two years, and we introduced some of those more classic scares where only part of the time there was sensory deprivation, and then you had the scare actors and everything else.
In our first research studies, people said that they felt closer to each other, but when we looked at the survey data, it really didn't move that much. They stayed basically the same. So we conducted interviews to ask people why did you say you felt closer, but during your surveys, your responses basically put you in the same amount of closeness with the person you felt closest to.
What we found was that a lot of what was going on wasn't going through the haunt itself, but being able to process it with their group afterward. Like who screamed the loudest? And what was the part that got you the most?
This story was compiled from interviews by Matthew Peddie for "Florida Matters Live and Local."
