How Horror Movies and True Crime Can Make You Happier

Halloween isn't just costumes and candy. It's also a time when we indulge our interest in the scary and macabre. But there's also a taboo about gory horror movies and gruesome true crime shows - we often feel that being interested in blood and violence is unhealthy. The opposite is possibly true. Psychologist Coltan Scrivner (author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away https://www.coltanscrivner.com/publications) says that watching a scary movie or listening to a murder podcast is perfectly natural and in fact teaches us valuable lessons to enhance our emotional resilience. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Laurie Santos?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. You'll learn about tools and strategies

• 0:45Laurie Santos?

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• 1:31Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:38Laurie Santos?

  Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love carving pumpkins and seeing my neighbors goofy decorations. I love seeing people in costumes and casually running into superheroes and fairies out on the street. I love cider donuts and Halloween candy and pumpkin spice anything, and I love that feeling of cozy nostalgia. But oddly enough, there is one big thing I don't get about spooky season. The spooky part. You see, I'm a complete scaredy cat. I can't handle haunted houses or horror films. And as a professor who studies the science of happiness, I struggle to wrap my mind around why people might enjoy this stuff. But as a Halloween fan, I also spend a lot of time wondering, am I missing out?

• 2:22Laurie Santos?

  Could I learn to enjoy the spooky stuff? Could leaning into fear make me happier? So this Halloween, I decided to ask the expert.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  I'm Colton Skripner. I'm a psychologist at Arizona State University, and I study the psychology of why we're drawn to things that sometimes scare us or disgust us.

• 2:40Laurie Santos?

  Colton is the author of a new book, Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away. Colton is a nerdy, rational academic like me. He doesn't believe in ghosts, but he has fully embraced his spooky side.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  I love going on ghost hunts. I live in a famously haunted little Victorian town, right? It's like one of the world's most haunted hotels just down the street from me. But it's a little weird that humans scare themselves for fun, right? I mean, the traditional thinking on fear is that fear evolved to help animals avoid danger. And so when you see something dangerous or think something dangerous is around, it should activate the emotion of fear and all the physiological side effects of that and the mental, psychological side effects of that. And typically, the response is to avoid whatever the thing is. In humans, and sometimes in other animals, but especially in humans, we sometimes seek out feelings of fear

• 3:38Speaker 02

  with the caveat that we're typically safe when we do that.

• 3:41Laurie Santos?

  So what is morbid curiosity? Give me a definition.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Well, the way that I've defined it is it's an interest in things that are threatening or potentially dangerous. Sometimes we're interested in actual threats. You know, if you see something happening out in the world and it's dangerous. Or sometimes we're interested in fictional threats, even things that we're not sure could exist, like ghosts, or aliens, or monsters.

• 4:06Laurie Santos?

  And so your journey into morbid curiosity started relatively early on with a genre that I found a little bit unexpected. Tell me what that was.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was thinking back, you know, when I started doing research in this and writing about it, I started thinking about my own experiences, obviously, with things that scared me, but that I found kind of intriguing. It was actually a video game. It was a Resident Evil video game on PlayStation, I think. One that, you know, probably I shouldn't have been playing and don't know where I got it from or why I had it. But I do remember that it was a really scary game, especially at the time, and especially for someone who was five or six. For those that don't know, Resident Evil is a zombie game. It was kind of one of the original survival zombie horror games. So you're thrust into this world where there's a zombie apocalypse and you kind of have to figure out some puzzles. But as you move through the world, there are zombies all around. And that's, that's really common to us now, but for video games, that was fairly new

• 4:58Speaker 02

  back in the 90s and had a fixed point of view. And so you couldn't, you physically couldn't turn around and look at things like you wanted to look at them. So actually, your perception was limited too, which is really frightening and really unnerving, especially when you can hear the zombies kind of groaning. And so you know they're nearby, but you can't actually turn your character and look.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  And just to be clear, you were five years old when you were playing this?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  I was, yeah, five or six, probably. I must have five or six, yeah. And I remember playing the game and I remember, you know, thinking, oh my gosh, this is so scary. But what I liked about it is that there were ways to kind of get away from the fear for a minute and kind of collect myself. You could pause the game. Now, pausing the game just kind of froze it, right? It doesn't really like protect you, but it does let you literally pause for a second and kind of strategize or think about like, what can I do, right? There were these safe rooms throughout the house where you could go to save your game. But those were also places where you could go and you could kind of strategize and think about what you're going to do and plan and sort of collect yourself and sort of go on and face your fears. And when I started writing about morbid curiosity and I started hearing about horror fans telling

• 6:03Speaker 02

  me that they use horror to kind of face their fears, I did start thinking about that experience. And I thought, you know, one byproduct of that might have been that I was kind of learning to overcome scary situations and kind of learning how to control feelings of anxiety and fear in a very safe setting, which I think is what in the modern world, morbid curiosity is, is really good for.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  One of your arguments is that this interest in violence, all things morbid and creepy, it might be a really fundamental part of our human nature, something that stems from really basic biases. In your book, you talk about this idea of a negativity bias and how that is interestingly and importantly, universal. What's a negativity bias and how does it play into morbid curiosity?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  When I started studying morbid curiosity, negativity bias literature is kind of the first thing I really sunk my teeth into because that was what psychologists were talking about. They were talking about negativity bias and there was a lot of research on it. And so I had a lot of stuff that I could read through to kind of get a sense of what had been done, what people had been thinking about. So negativity bias sounds like it's the fact that things that are negative in our lives capture our attention and our memory more powerfully than things that are positive or neutral. My issue with the framing of negativity bias is that it's a little unclear to me what it means for something to be negative. I give the example in my book, if I book a room at a haunted hotel, I expect to be like bothered by a ghost in my room, right? I expect that to happen. I want that to happen.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  So it's not really a negative event from my point of view, but it might be from someone who booked that hotel not knowing it was haunted. And there's been some work suggesting that humans are driven by negative events, their attention is, but it's really threatening events that are what capture our attention even more powerfully, right? And so I think what's at the core of negativity bias is a potential danger, a potential threat in many cases. So I think threat bias is kind of at the center of morbid curiosity, which is maybe part of a broader negativity bias that humans have.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  You told this one study in the book that I loved about people thinking about and remembering consumer products and their threat bias. Maybe explain that study here.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I believe that was a past couple of years study. He does some of the best work on threat bias. I mean, he laid a lot of the foundation for this fact that humans seem to be driven by threats, their attention is driven by threats. So he, in one of his studies, gave people, I think it was like shampoo, and it was descriptions of like side effects of this shampoo. And some of them were positive. It'll make your hair luscious, it'll make your hair thick. Some of them were sort of neutral, like it contains this product or it lathers up in this way. And some of them were negative, like it doesn't always work or may not work for your hair. And some of them were threatening, like it will make your hair fall out. He did this kind of chain study, almost like the game telephone a little bit, but like

• 8:50Speaker 02

  where you tell people, here are these eight facts about this shampoo, some positive, some neutral, some negative, some threatening. Pick seven of those eight and tell your friend about it. And then you do the next person in line. Okay, here's seven facts. Pick six of those. Tell your friend about those until you get down to one, where you can only tell your friend about one of those things. And what he found was that the type of information that made it to the end of that chain, that like the one that got passed on the most often, were the threatening types of information. So this shampoo can burn your scalp or make your hair fall out. And that kind of makes sense. Like if I'm going to tell Lori about this new shampoo that I've got, you know, if I have all this information, am I going to say it lathers this way? Or am I going to let her know, hey, and some people this like made their hair fall out?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  That's the kind of information I really want you to know, because I don't want you to come back to me later and say, hey, you recommended this shampoo to me and it made my hair fall out.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  But it seems like it's not just in terms of communication that this makes sense. Our curiosity about all things threatening and our attention towards things threatening seems to make a lot of evolutionary sense.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I was trained as a biologist for most of my career. And so when I started thinking about morbid curiosity, I first looked to animals. And I said, okay, is there anything in the animal kingdom that looks kind of like this? Is there anything that would have been maybe conserved across species? And one of the things I came across was predator inspection. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It's when an animal, a prey animal, inspects or pays attention to a potential predator. So if I were to ask you, what would a zebra do if it saw a lion on the savannah? Most people, reasonably so, would say, well, it would run away because a lion wants to eat a zebra. Right? But what you find is that zebras don't always run away when they see lions. Same thing with gazelles and cheetahs.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  There was this two-year study with cheetahs and gazelles, where I think it was Claire Fitzgibbon. She just observed how gazelles interacted with their natural predator, the cheetah, over an 18-month or a two-year period. And what she found was that gazelles would often stop and actually just inspect cheetahs when the cheetahs weren't actively hunting. And it wasn't normally distributed across all gazelles. So not all gazelles did this to the same extent. What she found were that it was actually the young gazelles that did it the most. And her explanation for this, which I think makes a lot of sense and probably applies to humans and the way that we consume media and entertainment, is that young gazelles were the most athletic, so they had the highest chance of getting away.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  They were the least at risk, if you will, but they also had the most to learn. They actually didn't have that many interactions with predators in their lifetime. And so, learning about a cheetah, what does it look like? Where does it hang out? What does it look like when it's resting? What does it look like when it's moving? How do my parents or other group members react when it's doing this or that? That can teach them a lot that will serve them for the rest of their life. And what's interesting is when you look at humans, if you break down the age ratio of who tends to be, for example, a horror fan, it tends to peak around teenage years and young adult years. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't little five or six-year-olds playing violent or scary video games, and it doesn't mean that there aren't 70-year-olds who still love George Romero.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  It just means that, on average, everybody has this kind of peak in curiosity around their teenage years and young adult years. And you see that in a lot of animals, too.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  And the idea is that that peak corresponds with when we need to learn about this stuff. It allows us to learn some really valuable information that we could use later. But the difference between a zebra and a human is that humans have all these other mechanisms to learn without kind of directly watching on the savanna. Explain how we can witness and learn about danger in even less costly ways than other animals.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, if zebras could make movies or TV shows, they would absolutely make movies and TV shows about lions, right? That's what most of their TV shows and books and movies would be about. Yeah, if you're an animal that doesn't have language and transmissible culture, your only way to learn about threats is really to learn about them firsthand. And that's a really good way to learn about them in the sense that you learn the truth, but it's a bad way to learn about them in the sense that it's very dangerous. And so, you're going to take fewer opportunities to learn about danger than someone who can learn about it safely, because you're going to have to wait for the right moment to learn about it. And it's really important to capture that right moment. It's important for that young gazelle to pay attention to the cheetah when it's the

• 13:14Speaker 02

  right moment, in the right circumstances, at the right time, but that's not going to be most of the time. Now with humans, you know, let's say we want to learn about a wolf. We don't have to go out into the forest and find a wolf and watch it and see what it does. Right? That would be one way to learn about a wolf, but that's a pretty dangerous way to learn about a wolf. A better way to learn about a wolf is to ask someone who has had an interaction with the wolf already. Or if there's some communal knowledge about wolves, create stories that are, you know, like in the film industry, what they call psychologically real. The characters are behaving as if they were real. They have believable actions. So you have this story about a wolf and what it might do if you ran into it in the forest in this situation or this other situation.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Maybe it's this wolf with exaggerated features, a werewolf. And those exaggerated features kind of clue you in to what are the really dangerous parts of the wolf? Big teeth, big claws, they're fast, they can track you. And so we can learn about any number of potentially dangerous predators that maybe we've never even seen through stories. And then we can take those stories and now we can write them down. We can create audio visual hallucinations of them so that they're very rich and detailed. It's just very, very cheap for us to learn about predators. And this is true with true crime as well. When our mind sees this opportunity to learn about a potentially dangerous person or predator or event, and there's no cost to us.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I mean, that seems like a great deal, right? Of course, we're going to be drawn to that. Of course, our curiosity will be piqued.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  You've argued that our curiosity for kind of things that are scary and morbid falls into four different categories. Let's kind of walk through each of those categories.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  There seem to be about four categories, four broad categories of morbid curiosity. So those are the minds of dangerous people. So this is an interest in sort of the thinking behind someone who is violent or dangerous. Why are they doing the things that you're doing? What are their justifications? How did they get this way? And that's really good if you know about that for predicting who might be violent. Or if you're interacting with someone who is violent. A second one, which sounds closely related, but is actually a bit different, is an interest in violence itself. So this is an interest in the act of violence. This would be, you know, what the Romans were experiencing when they go to the Colosseum or what you experience if you go to an MMA match or a boxing match. It's not an interest in seeing people be hurt, which I think is a common misconception. It's really just an interest in the action and the event.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Because violent events are really consequential events, at least historically. They've been very consequential events and they're important to pay attention to. And you can learn a lot about the two people who are interacting, why they're fighting, who's more powerful, who you should maybe be in a coalition with or not be in a coalition with. So you have minds of dangerous people, violence. You have an interest in sort of bodily injuries or body violations. These are kind of the the outcomes of interacting with something dangerous, whether it's intentional or accidental. So if I am in a violent fight or I, you know, come across a dangerous animal in the woods or have a terrible fall or accident, as an outsider, I can view someone who that happened

• 16:20Speaker 02

  to and see what are the consequences of this thing or how dangerous is this event really? And you can kind of get a good gauge of that by how bad the injury is or what the injury looks like. It can also tell you something about, you know, as humans, we like to help others and we like to heal others. And, you know, if we were only disgusted and pushed away from injuries, we wouldn't be very good healers. So you have those three, and then the final one is one that I wrestled with a little bit, but the supernatural or paranormal. And I really, I think what this is about is an interest in things that we don't quite understand. We think you're out there or we're getting some clues that something is out there, but we don't have enough information. So this could be, and it doesn't matter whether you believe in them or not, this could be aliens, it could be ghosts, it could be demons, it can be anything that kind of, there are

• 17:05Speaker 02

  hints in our culture that there's something out there that is intentionally obscuring itself or hiding itself. You know, you don't often think of demons, ghosts or aliens as being friendly. Casper's like a, an exception to that, right? Like, most of the time when we talk about ghosts, we talk about malevolent ghosts. Or if we talk about aliens, we're not usually thinking the aliens are going to be our friends because they are intentionally hiding themselves. And in humans, if somebody is being intentionally obscure or hiding themselves, they usually have poor intentions. So we're kind of putting those human psychological characteristics onto these other entities. So that's what the supernatural category is sort of about.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  So I find these four categories really fascinating because I feel like if you just look at the entertainment that's making the most money in the modern day, it's like picking off each of these different categories, right? Like, take the minds of dangerous people, the first category you mentioned, right? As a podcaster, it's just obvious that true crime podcasts are just like taking off. Like, the data show they're like, I think it's the third biggest category of podcasts after comedy and news. Obviously, news is something we need to know about, but the third biggest category of things we want to know about are like the strange minds of crazy psychopaths.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Also, what's in the news typically? Things that are violent and dangerous, right? There was a study published, I think now it's probably been 15 or 20 years, but it looked at categories of news topics throughout time. I think it was over like a 300 or 400-year period in, I think it was nine or 10 different societies. And the top two most common categories across time, across cultures, were death and accidental injury.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Even in news, our morbid curiosity is coming back. It's so fascinating. I mean, I also think about the things in entertainment that stick with me, and they tend to be the things that are like the most gory or portray some sort of really incredible mind. You use this example in the book, which totally lives rent-free in my brain, of watching Raiders of the Lost Ark as a little kid. And if you've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, you might remember that there's this part at the end where the ark comes out and everybody's face starts melting. And like, that literally like sometimes still pops into my dreams, you know, even though I haven't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark in forever. So like, just kind of messing with bodies and what bodies are capable of just seems to be...

• 19:14Speaker 02

  And that kind of mixes. I mean, Raiders of the Lost Ark does a great job of mixing all of these categories. It's got the supernatural with like the ark and kind of this mysterious thing that melts your face like an ice cream cone. And then it has some of the minds of dangerous people with the Nazis and with the bad guys. But then it also has bodily injury or bodily violation with the effects of the supernatural. And so it really does a good job of, I think... Capturing all these different areas of morbid curiosity, which probably helps make it a widely enjoyed movie, right? Because maybe you don't enjoy one aspect of that, but maybe you're really into supernatural. Or maybe you don't like the minds of dangerous people, but you're really into the bodily injuries. I mean, you kind of get these different features coming at you that trigger people in different kinds,

• 19:58Speaker 02

  that would trigger their curiosity in different kinds of ways.

• 20:01Laurie Santos?

  I can't handle much violence or gore, and anything involving ghosts or zombies, I'd be sleeping with the lights on. But I do love a good true crime documentary, so maybe I've got a little morbid curiosity in me after all. Which got me thinking. When does our fascination with spooky stuff actually begin? Turns out, a lot earlier than you might imagine. After the break, we'll hear more about our obsession with spirits, spooks, and psychopaths. And we'll find out why kids often like to mix a little fear into their fun. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.

• 20:37Laurie Santos?

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• 23:29Speaker 03

  So it seems like our morbid curiosity is just like all over entertainment, from like movies, from action to horror to true crime podcasts, to like watching MMA and, you know, World Wrestling Federation and all this stuff. But I get the sense that people are a little bit freaked out about morbid curiosity, both in themselves and in other people. And in your book, you talk about how often people's morbid curiosity is used as a scapegoat. Explain what you mean there.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think, you know, you see this with serial killers especially, or any kind of, you know, if you watch a true crime documentary, they always go back and they ask what happened in this individual's childhood that caused them to be like they are. Now, that's not a bad thing to ask. I don't think that's an interesting thing. It's potentially useful. But the problem is, sometimes you find the one thing that you're a little biased to think caused it, and then as soon as that pops up, you say, aha, that's why they've done it. So, you know, one example that I give is with Jeffrey Dahmer. So Dahmer, serial killer, cannibal, horrible, atrocious crimes, really had this obsession with one particular horror movie. I don't even know if he was a horror movie fan, but he had this obsession with The Exorcist

• 24:34Speaker 02

  III, which is kind of an obscure film a little bit. But it is about a serial killer, and he did kind of supposedly emulate, or try to emulate this villain in the film. And when people found that out, they went, aha, of course, he's a cannibalistic serial killer. He watched The Exorcist III over and over again. Another famous example is with the Columbine shooters. You know, they played, I don't remember the exact games, I think it was like some, you know, action game that had some violence in it. And so when people found that out, because of course with these kids, they said, oh my God, what could have caused these kids to do this? And the first thing that came up was, oh, it was violent video games. That must have caused it. But really, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things wrong with that.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  One is that studies that have looked at school shooters have found that they actually are less interested in violent video games than non-school shooters, right? And that's, of course, a very small sample size against a very, very large sample size. So there's some, maybe some problems with that, but it doesn't seem clear that like all school shooters are obsessed with violent video games or something. And with Dahmer, I think, you know, the thing that's funny to me is that the same morbid curiosity that people are blaming for his crimes is also why those people are interested in his crimes in the first place and what caused them, right?

• 25:47Speaker 03

  That's why they're listening to podcasts about him and watching Netflix series about him and so on.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. You know, it's a different subcategory of, but it's still this interest in things that are violent or dangerous, right? So are some serial killers interested in violence? Yeah, I would, I would say probably, right? They are violent individuals, they're probably going to be interested in violence. But it's short sighted to think that because they're interested in violence, that caused their violence.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  So the idea is when the costs of learning about our threat are low, it's super advantageous to pay attention to it and become curious about it, which is where horror movies and podcasts and video games and all this stuff comes from. We've been talking about how like younger individuals, like the young gazelles and things like that are learning about the lions. But there's also something that animals do a lot that lets them learn, which is specifically about play. And so kind of explain what play is and why it's so powerful for animals evolutionarily, right?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Play has been kind of a tricky topic for people who study animals because it doesn't have a good definition because we're not really sure what play is or what it's for. But the best definition that I've come across for play is that play helps animals safely or more safely practice either events or rehearse events or interactions that they might experience later in life. And that makes a lot of sense, right? So for example, with dogs, dogs engage in rough and tumble play. This involves usually them rolling around, kind of chasing each other. This is like what wolves do as adults. Wolves are chase predators, if you will. So they don't really stalk their prey. They kind of, once they see them, they chase them. And this is what, if you have a dog at home, this is what they do. They like to play fetch. They go and they chase things, right?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Cats also engage in play, but they engage in a very different kind of play. So when cats play with each other, they do tend to kind of stalk each other. They do tend to kind of hide and jump out at each other. And this is exactly what cats do to their prey, right? They're stalker predators. So there are these kind of species-specific types of play that you see. In humans, we do a lot of group play. You know, you see kids on the playground and like you can give them activities to do. But if you just let them do their own games or come up with their own way to entertain themselves, oftentimes it will involve some sort of group play or social dynamics because that's what humans do. We engage with each other. And so kind of playing with that or practicing that is something that you see among little kids.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  And you've argued that one of the kinds of play we do is more specifically scary play. Give me some examples of this in humans.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Humans are a little unique in that they tend to play a bit longer in life. But of course, kids are still sort of the perfect players, right? Like they, they would spend almost all of their time playing if they could. One thing I found really interesting, because I don't study kids, I'm not a developmental psychologist, but I had an experience with kids that just made me realize, wow, kids are very morbidly curious. So. When I was in my master's degree, I used to do these science summer camps for kids. And I was, you know, a young twenty something, didn't have kids, didn't really know how to like, teach young kids. Turns out they have very short attention spans and need a lot of time to play, right? This was me growing up in Oklahoma. This was a summer camp. Oklahoma summers are very, very hot. Can't always go outside and play because it's too hot, right?

• 29:01Speaker 02

  And so I had to learn how to play games with kids in this very confined area. And so the game has a twenty something that I could come up with, that I could think of for large groups of people, was the game Mafia or Werewolf. So if you haven't heard of this before, there are kind of variations on the same game, but really the idea is that you have this group of individuals who live together in a town, and there's some kind of predator, dangerous person. In the case of Mafia, it's two Mafia members. In the case of Werewolf, it's two werewolves. And the story goes, each night the town goes to sleep, so the kids cover their eyes, and two individuals who are pre-selected as Mafia members come out and they choose someone to kill, right? And then the town wakes up and they're told so-and-so was killed last night by the Mafia.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  You have to get justice, which humans love justice as well. You have to figure out who the killer was. So there's a lot of things in this game. Again, humans play social games where there's social deception, there's justice, there's all these things that we do as adults that you practice. That's good. So I was playing this game with the kids, and in the game, there's a narrator, and I was playing the part of the narrator. And because the kids were pretty young, I was trying to be as PG as I could with a game about killing people and then hanging them for their crimes. So I would just say, you know, the Mafia came out and they so-and-so died, and yeah, now you need to find justice. After a couple of rounds, some of the kids asked if they could be the narrator. So I said, sure, you can be the narrator. So I let them narrate. Well, it turns out the kids, when the town would go to sleep at night and the Mafia would

• 30:27Speaker 02

  come out, the Mafia were incredibly violent. I mean, there were these horrible stories about how so-and-so was murdered and their guts were pulled out and they were thrown in the lake and their heads were chopped off. You know, all these terrible things that were happening. And the kids loved getting justice for that. They loved finding someone that they could hang for these terrible crimes. And so the story just became this horrible scene from like the worst horror movie that you could imagine. You know, later, when I reflected on that, I was like, wow, kids are incredibly morbidly curious. And you see this in their games, too. You know, like, oftentimes, there's a bad guy and he's out to get you or kill you or hurt you. Even if you look at games that look pretty innocent, games like hide and seek or tag. Tag is a game about a predator out trying to get other people and get them.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Hide and seek is about a bunch of people hiding from a predator who's out to get them. They're playing these games that involve danger in a safe way and in a way that they kind of learn how to hide, how to run, how to interact with people, how to engage in social deception, or how to spot social deception. There's a lot of elements of threat or danger in the games that kids even come up with themselves.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  And this is also true, not just in their games, but in so much kid-related culture. I remember learning things like, you know, that song Ring Around the Rosie, what's it about? Like, it's about the plague.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  It's about the plague, yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  It's about the plague. You know, you look at Grimm's fairy tales where there's predators and dangerous things happening all the time. It seems like we forget that kids are just super morbidly curious, which raises this question, like, if they're really engaging in all this stuff, does it actually help them learn? Or does it help us as adults learn? And I wanted to turn to one of the natural experiments that you had a chance to look at when a real dangerous thing did happen to us, and that was during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in early 2020, I had this great study set up. This was my first, like, big study for my PhD. I curated this cabinet of morbid curiosities, and I had an eye-tracking kit that people were going to use when they inspected. It was a very cool study that I'd been planning for a long time. I started participant recruitment in March or February of 2020, and then like a week later, the school shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. And so, like everyone else, I kind of had to pivot my research and figure something else out, because now I couldn't do this project that I had been planning. So I thought, okay, well, the world is like in a very weird place right now. We're afraid because there's this new virus we don't know a lot about that's seemingly like very dangerous.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  There's this lockdown that nobody's ever experienced, and we're kind of told we can't go out and do the things we're normally able to do. Everything about the world was pretty scary, in one way or another, for most people at that time. And actually, there was an editor at News Scientist who had asked this question to my collaborator, Mathias Kleisen. She asked him, are people who are horror fans, are they actually doing better right now because they've practiced this? So Mathias is a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. He's a horror literature scholar, and he and I have worked together for many years on different projects relating to horror. And I, you know, I messaged Mathias and I said, this is a great idea for a study. Let's do this. And so we teamed up with some other colleagues of ours and we came up with what was honestly like a very simple study.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  We recruited people and we had them answer surveys about how morbidly curious they were. We had them answer surveys about their personalities. We had them tell us some demographic information. And then we created this psychological resilience scale that measured positive resilience, which is sort of how optimistic you are about your future and about how well you think you can handle the stresses of the future, given what's happening now. And we asked people what kind of movies they tended to enjoy. Do you like horror movies or romance movies? Are you watching more of these now? You know, are you watching fewer of them? Have you seen any pandemic movies, you know, in your lifetime? What we thought we would find was that people who were horror fans and morbidly curious might be a bit higher in psychological resilience. And that is what we found with some weird caveats.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  So people who were horror movie fans reported much lower physiological distress during the pandemic. So they were feeling lower levels of anxiety, depression, sleeplessness. People who were morbidly curious reported higher levels of positive resilience, meaning they were more optimistic about their ability to handle this particular stress going forward. They were optimistic that they could get through it. And then one interesting finding was that people who had seen just one pandemic movie, that's all you had to see was one, reported they were much more prepared for the pandemic and more resilient during it.

• 34:56Laurie Santos?

  So our morbid curiosity about scary situations might actually give us a little protection when similar events happen in real life. But what about the everyday scares? That life stress and work anxiety that so many of us face? Could braving a film like Psycho or The Shining help us handle those two? When we get back from the break, Colton will share how flirting with fear might help us get better at handling our tough emotions. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

• 35:25Laurie Santos?

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• 38:12Laurie Santos?

  I always assumed that scaredy cats like me usually stick to the comedies and steer clear of the thrillers. But it turns out it's not that simple. When people are feeling anxious or stressed out, they're just as likely, if not more so, to grab a scary movie and cozy up on the couch for a good fright. I asked horror expert Dr. Coltan Scrivner to break down the research on why that is.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  You would think that people who are anxious or scaredy cats are the kind of people who would avoid horror, and that, again, on its face, makes a lot of sense. If you're really afraid, why seek out something that's just gonna make you more afraid? When I started thinking about this topic of like, who goes out to see scary movies? I had that initial thought, too. Well, it's probably people who are not anxious, right? Because why would they do that? But then again, I thought about it a little differently, a little more, and I thought, well, those are also the kinds of people who are gonna wanna learn about this stuff. They should be actually seeking out information. And so I dug into the literature to see if anybody had tested this. And there was one really cool sort of field study on this. So, pre-streaming, there were physical places you would go to rent your movies, right?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  You would walk into like Blockbuster, Family Video. You would go into the store, and they would have movies everywhere, and you would browse, and it was great. It was a lot of fun. So these researchers, I think this was in 2000, I want to say seven or eight, they set up like a booth outside of a Blockbuster video. And as people came into the store, they surveyed them on their mood. So how were they feeling? And what these researchers wanted to know was, how does your mood affect the kind of entertainment that you want to consume? So they sat outside this Blockbuster store. People came in and they would ask them, how nervous are you feeling? How angry are you feeling? How happy are you feeling? And reasonably so, they assumed that people who were anxious would probably seek out something kind of happy to help them get into a better mood.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  People who were feeling bored might seek out an action movie. So the idea was like you would kind of seek the opposite of what you were feeling in order to get you to this state that you wanted to be in. So the people would go in the store and they would browse. They would pick their movies and they would come out. And when they came out, the researchers would say, hey, can you tell us what kind of movie? What movies did you get? And then they would note down the genre of the movie. And what they found, at least for horror, was the exact opposite of what they thought. So the people who came in feeling anxious and nervous, those were the people most likely to watch a horror movie.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  So those findings violate all my intuitions, but they also raise this really, they also raise this really interesting question, which is that like maybe scary movies actually can help us become less anxious. And so how did researchers wind up testing that?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Well, when I started looking into this, when I started looking into, okay, what does it mean that anxious people sometimes seek out scary movies? There wasn't much in the literature. And so I actually went to like Reddit threads and online articles, op-eds and magazines, because people were talking about this a lot. Real people in the world were talking about this, but academics were not. And a lot of people would talk about how they accidentally discovered that when they were feeling anxious, feel like these are people who have oftentimes like clinical anxiety, or maybe they're just having a really anxious time in their life. They would feel this like strange urge to turn on something scary, even if they were not horror fans, even if they had never been horror fans.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  And they discovered that it kind of helped them calm down or get through that. And I thought that was super intriguing and it kind of matched up with this blockbuster study. So I thought, okay, there's got to be a way to do an academic study on this. And so we created this survey that again, had a bunch of different statements about why people like horror movies. And we collected these from all over the internet and magazines and, you know, just people talking about why they liked horror movies. And what we found were that horror fans seem to be lumped into kind of three types, right? And these aren't mutually exclusive with each other, but there's sort of three broad types. There's the adrenaline junkie who does like horror because it kind of makes them feel alive.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  And this is kind of the classic psychological explanation for why people like scary things that are playful. Same reason that they enjoy roller coaster or skydiving or any other high adrenaline activity. But there's another group that we called the white knucklers because you're just like watching the movie with your fist clenched. These are people who are truly afraid, like very afraid of what's going on, but they still choose to do it. So those people were really interesting to us because we wanted to know like, why are you doing this if you're truly afraid of it? And then we found this third group that we didn't necessarily expect to find. And we decided to call them the dark copers because these people essentially were telling us that they use scary things to help them get through difficult times in their life. That could be depression, it could be anxiety, it could be kind of thinking about existential problems.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  And so at the time I was doing these sort of yearly or annual haunted house studies in Denmark with my collaborator, Matthias. So there's this haunted attraction like you go to in Halloween, right? A haunted house near Orhus where Matthias was based. And so I would go visit him for a few weeks and we would actually go to this haunted house. And kind of like the blockbuster study, we would set up this big research tent outside the haunted house where people would take surveys or we would strap them up to heart rate monitors. And we wanted to kind of know like, how are these people playing with fear? How are they engaging in scary play in the real world? So we had these three groups identified. We had the, the survey created. We took it to the haunted house. We had people take the survey before they went in.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  And then when they came out, we asked them, what do you feel like you got out of this experience? Like, did you get a mood boost? Do you feel like you learned something about yourself? Do you feel like you've kind of developed as an individual like you would in therapy or something? And what we found were that there were distinct benefits to these different kinds of horror fans. So people who were adrenaline junkies, they mostly did like it because they got the mood boost. They didn't say that they learned anything about themselves. They didn't say that they developed as a person. They just kind of enjoyed the experience. But what was interesting is that the adrenaline junkies were a really small portion of our participants. The other, probably two thirds of the people identified, based on our survey, as white knucklers or dark coppers.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  And these people said that they learned something about themselves and kind of developed as a person. And when you ask them, you know, what do you mean by that? They would say things like, I learned the boundaries of my fear, kind of like what I could handle and what I can't. I learned how I would react in this like high intensity scary situation that I've never been in before. Some people even explicitly would say, now I know what I need to do better. If I'm ever in a situation that's scary like this again. And, and usually they were talking not about the literal situation, like a man in a pig mask chasing you with a chainsaw. But they were talking about the, the emotional situation. How do I handle these emotions that are overwhelmingly negative in many ways?

• 44:57Speaker 03

  And this relates to a few things that we talk about a lot on this podcast, right? One is this idea that if you want to get good at regulating your emotions, whether that's sadness or in this case, fear, you actually have to practice doing that.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  And our instinct isn't to practice regulating our emotions. It's to avoid emotions all the time. Right? And so it seems like what your participants were doing in this case, or at least kind of ones that identified as white knucklers or dark coppers, they use the haunted house experience and the anxiety that came up there. To like, practice a little bit coping. Another reason I love your studies and it fits with the kind of stuff that we talk about on the podcast is that we often talk about the problem of suppressing our emotions, right? When we're feeling anxious, our move is like, oh, shut it off, pretend it's not happening. But a lot of the research suggests that the way you get through a negative emotion like anxiety is to actually feel it. And maybe what better way to feel it than to like, really ramp it up in some like incredibly intense haunted house?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  A safe way.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  And in a safe way, exactly.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Again, it kind of goes back to this idea of play. I think this is just an example of scary play. And if the point of play is to rehearse situations, well, situations can be literal. They can be, I need to know how to run, or I need to know how to, like, if I'm disoriented, how to get away. Or they can be more psychological or emotional. They can be, if I'm feeling this, how do I re-center myself a little bit and get through this?

• 46:13Speaker 03

  And so if someone's hearing all these benefits that your haunted housegoers got out of scary play, and they're curious about morbid curiosity, what would be some suggestions about dipping their feet in? Especially if there's somebody who hasn't engaged in a lot of this scary play so far?

• 46:27Speaker 02

  The common mistake that I hear is that people think they need to go out and do like, the scariest thing that they could imagine. That's the wrong way to do it, right? Because of course, that's going to be too much. And that's usually what you hear. If you talk to adults and you say, you know, do you like horror movies? And if they say no, you ask them why. Usually, the answer is, oh, I watched one when I was a kid that was too scary for me, and I just haven't been able to watch them since. But what's interesting is, a lot of the people who as adults become horror fans, and this happened during COVID a lot, actually. Horror had its best two years in history at the box office in 2020 and 2021. So people were seeking out these like scary experiences, for the first time, many of them, and realizing, maybe I can enjoy this.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  But yeah, I think the mistake that people make is that they think they should seek out something really scary that's going to terrify them. What you should do is exactly what developmental psychologists tell us to do all the time, which is kind of go to the edge of what you're able to do, right? The edge of what you can handle. And that's different for everybody. You know, we did this study at the haunted house where we strapped people up with heart rate monitors, and we wanted to know, is there kind of like a sweet spot of fear? Is there this optimal experience, Goldilocks zone? Because that's true for a lot of things. It's true for learning, it's true for flow states, or where you're really productive. And so we thought, well, maybe it's true for fear, too. And that doesn't seem to be true. What we found in this study was that- There's a sweet spot and the sweet spot is a little different for everybody, but it

• 47:51Speaker 02

  does tend to be kind of like, if you imagine a one to 10 scale, it's like about a seven out of 10. When they were too afraid, their heart rate was too erratic, they weren't having as good of a time. When it was about seven out of 10 on the max, that's when they were really having the best time, having the most fun. And so I think what you should do if you're trying to get into scary entertainment and you're curious if maybe this could help you, start with the easy stuff. Start with stuff you know you can handle, right? And then kind of just go from there and edge up further and further until you get to something that is kind of scary and you do have to practice that emotion regulation. You're kind of in your Goldilocks zone, you're in your sweet spot. But eventually your sweet spot is going to move, right? You're going to get better at that, going to be able to handle something more. And I think this is what a lot of people are afraid of when it comes to horror movies.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  They argue that, oh, well, it desensitizes you to violence or it desensitizes you to these things. And I think, I think it does desensitize you, but not to violence per se, not to real violence. It desensitizes you a little bit to your anxiety and to your fear and it allows you to actually handle higher doses.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  This makes me very comforted that we're starting out with baby steps into morbid curiosity as somebody who's really afraid of this stuff.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  I know, I need, I need to write a, um, my baby's first morbidly curious experience book.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  That's definitely the one that I need. My husband and I are inspired by your book and been trying to watch more horror movies and thrillers. And sometimes I'm like, timeout, this is too much, we're going to hit pause on this, we're going to watch it again tomorrow.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  That's what you should be doing, yeah, is like, if it's too much, like, pause for a second, you know, it's okay to like, cover your eyes in portions, those are emotion regulation skills, those are tactics, right? Like, when people cover their eyes in a scary scene, they're regulating their anxiety and their fear, right? And over time, they might get a little better at that. They do have to kind of like, push yourself to peek, right? You kind of have to like, look through your fingers a little bit.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  I'm a big fan of the turtleneck in horror movies.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  And gory movies, I recently watched The Substance with Demi Moore, great film, but a lot. But the turtleneck, you can just kind of cover up your eyes, peek with one eye, pull it back up and down.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  But those are skills, right? That's the kind of thing I might need to take in a different form into a situation that's really anxiety provoking or really scary in my normal life.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And eventually you do learn to take more cognitive approaches to emotion regulation, right? Those are like physical things you can do. You can turn the lights on, you can turn the sound down, you can cover your eyes in scary scenes. But you also are inherently practicing cognitive emotion regulation skills, cognitive reframing, you know, telling yourself that how extreme I feel right now doesn't match like what's really happening. So you are practicing those cognitive skills as well. So in order to get like the optimal amount of fun, people kind of regulate their fear both up and down. So sometimes they want to be more afraid. And so they kind of get into it really and let themselves scream and like look at the actors and look at the scary things. And sometimes they cover their eyes and sometimes they tell themselves it's not real.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  And it's all in this attempt to regulate how afraid you are, how anxious you're feeling so that you can have the most fun. But of course, the side effect of that is you're practicing regulating your emotions both up and down. And so you have more kind of just mastery in general over those negative emotions that we tend to avoid.

• 50:50Laurie Santos?

  So safely enjoying a bunch of psychopaths and monsters may not only get your blood pumping in the moment, it may also make you a little bit more resilient in the long run. That's a pretty compelling reason to dive a little deeper into spooky season this year. Now, I'm not quite willing to give up my turtleneck or keep my finger off the pause button, but this Halloween, I think I'm finally ready to take some baby steps towards embracing my inner scream queen. To my fellow scaredy cats, let me know if you decide to do the same. In the name of a happier Halloween, I challenge all of us to seek out a bit more spooky delight. The Happiness Lab will be on a short break for the next few weeks, but we'll be back

• 51:31Laurie Santos?

  soon with more holiday-related episodes, just in time for the season of gift giving. So be sure to swing back for more episodes of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 51:51Laurie Santos?

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• 53:43Laurie Santos?

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