The following essay is covered in The Conversation, an online publication.
Halloween is a time to show your disgust, from horror films to haunted houses with fake guts.
There's an attraction to stuff that makes us cringe.
You can find shows like "adventurous eating", in which hosts and contestants are served all manner of stomach-clenching foods, as well as reality shows that take a deep dive into the work of dermatologist.
This can be seen in other media. You can find depictions of sibling incest in romance novels that are meant to make the reader want to read more. There are websites that show real footage of death and dismemberment for people who want to watch it.
It isn't just a media phenomenon. There is a culture of disgust in early modern England.
Why are so many people drawn to things that make them want to kill themselves? Modern science has a solution to how the emotion of disgust works.
Disgust encourages you to avoid something that may be harmful to your body.
Charles Darwin said that the feeling of disgust is excited by anything odd in the appearance, smell or nature of our food. According to this theory, it evolved to guard against diseases like disease, animals, bodily injury, corpses or sex.
Disgust seems to have evolved to regulate things that are harmful, such as violating morals, cultural rules and cherished values. Some people may say they are disgusted by an act of racism.
Because of these regulatory functions, disgust is often referred to as the "gateway emotion", the " exclusionary emotion" or the " body and soul emotion".
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How do we account for the fact that some things can get in the way of our attention?
Research shows that disgusting stimuli retain your attention more effectively than neutral stimuli.
It seems that an attentional bias towards disgust would better equip humans to avoid harmful substances. Disgust can be unpleasant, but the emotion has evolved to grab people's attention.
Disgusting things can make you enjoy them.
The human tendency to seek out seemingly negative experiences for the purpose of enjoying "constrained risks" may be an example of benign masochism.
It is possible that a negative feeling can be enjoyable if it is removed from the idea that what is happening is bad.
There is a psychological mechanism that allows you to enjoy disgusting things, even if you don't like them.
It isn't a product of the digital age. In Shakespeare's time, it was happening.
As much gore as today's horror movies can be found in the playwright's notorious tragedy. The play stages 14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity, and 1 of cannibalism.
Cynthia Marshall asked, "Why would an audience, any audience, enjoy the violence of this play?"
I think the answer is due to the nature of disgust documented by psychologists. There was a cottage industry of disgust in England in the early 20th century.
The corpses of criminals were hung by chains for the public to see. Doctors perform autopsies in open theaters. In their shops, apothecaries used to display dismembered human body parts before mixing them into medicines.
Elizabethans were desensitized and possessed a different threshold for disgust. The diarist Samuel Pepys was happy to see a charred body in a warehouse.
The horrors of a play like "Titus Andronicus" reflect the fact that Elizabethans lived in a culture that encouraged people to look at things that were not good. Shakespeare's audience embraced the repulsive pleasure just as modern audiences do when watching the latest film in the Halloween franchise.
You can take a perverse pleasure in the things that you need to be protected because of the human emotion that protects you from harm.
The conversation published this article. The original article is worth a read.
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