Haunted house study sheds light on how human body responds to threats

The 17th Door haunted house in Orange County, California has become a popular haunt for Halloween scare seekers since it opened in the summer of 2015. A recent paper published in the journal Psychological Science explains how the human body responds to threats differently depending on certain factors.

We have previously reported that human beings tend to seek out scary movies, horror novels, and haunted houses throughout the year. This tendency has been dubbed "recreational fear" in the academic literature, a mixed emotional experience of fear and enjoyment.

The author of Why Horror Seduces conducted his own investigation of two different fear-regulation strategies employed by subjects in a haunted house. The core hypothesis of Clasen is that horror exploits the fear system.

Clasen's hypothesis was supported by a 2020 study. The 2010 film Insidious and the 2016 film The Conjuring 2 were used to map the neural activity of subjects while they watched horror movies. They focused on two different types of fear: the creeping sense of foreboding in a spooky setting and the sudden appearance of a monster or other threat. During the former scenarios, there are marked increases in brain activity in terms of visual and auditory perception. The better to respond to any perceived threats, the better the brain activity was in the sudden shock scenarios.

Clasen told Ars that a haunted house is a perfect laboratory simulation. It is unethical, but also less interactive. The key to generating fear is immersion.

Clasen gave his subjects heart rate monitors, while Tashjian gave his subjects wristbands that measured sweat-related changes in their skin. Animals show a reduction in fear responses if they are in bigger groups, which is why we are interested in social behavior during a threatening event like the haunted house. We wanted to see if the same could be said for humans in an intense threat.

Clasen and his colleagues used heartbeat data as a measure of sympathetic nervous system activity, which is similar to the data used by Tashjian.

The study was developed in response to a growing desire to identify contextual and endogenous factors related to sympathetic nervous system responses to threats. anxiety is associated with impaired inhibition of threat responding to safety as well as generalizing threat responses to stimuli that are perceptually similar to threats but are themselves safe stimuli. Being in groups, fear events and other contextual factors are identified in our study.

The 17th Door haunted house is the brainchild of a husband and wife team namedRobbie and Heather Luther, who run a professional production company. There are 17 different rooms, each containing a different kind of scare for the study. A woman named Paula is in Perpetuum Penitentiary for the murder of her son. She is fighting for her redemption against the scum of the earth. The experience lasts about 30 minutes.