Month: November 2020

Fear is typically viewed as a negative emotion, an adverse reaction to keep us on our toes with regard to potential dangers in our environment. But human beings also tend to seek out scary movies, horror novels, or haunted houses—and not just during the Halloween season. This tendency has been dubbed "recreational fear" in the academic literature: a "mixed emotional experience of fear and enjoyment." But the scare factor has to be just right in order to achieve that mixed state, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science that correlates this "Goldilocks zone" of subjective enjoyment with a telltale range of heart-rate fluctuations.

“By investigating how humans derive pleasure from fear, we find that there seems to be a ‘sweet spot’ where enjoyment is maximized,” said co-author Marc Malmdorf Andersen, a researcher at the Interacting Minds Center at Denmark’s Aarhus University. “Our study provides some of the first empirical evidence on the relationship between fear, enjoyment, and physical arousal in recreational forms of fear.”

This is just the latest development in a course of research spearheaded by Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University, another co-author, and the author of Why Horror Seduces. For instance, Clasen has examined the dominant personality traits of horror fans. (They tend to score highly on openness to experience, also called intellect imagination.) And last year we reported on his investigation of two different fear-regulation strategies employed by subjects participating in a Danish haunted house: "adrenaline junkies," who lean into the fear, and "white-knucklers," who try to tamp down their fear. A third study still in progress will examine the relationship between fear and memory.

Enlarge / Response coordinator for White House Coronavirus Task Force Deborah Birx wears a facemask she listens to US President Donald Trump deliver a news conference in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on July 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | Jim Watson)

A top White House coronavirus advisor is sounding a dire alarm over the ongoing, record-high surge in coronavirus cases in the country, warning, “We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic”—a warning that President Donald Trump is openly disregarding.

In a November 2 internal report leaked to The Washington Post, White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx wrote that the United States will likely see more than 100,000 new cases a day this week. The surge will lead to “increasing mortality” in the coming weeks and months. She called upon the administration to take “much more aggressive action.”

“This is not about lockdowns,” Dr. Birx noted bluntly. “It hasn’t been about lockdowns since March or April. It’s about an aggressive balanced approach that is not being implemented.”