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

The 17th Door haunted house experience has become a regular part of the annual Halloween scare scene in Orange County, California, attracting thousands of terrifying people since it opened in 2014. And now it’s contributing to science, especially our understanding of how the human body responds to threats differently depending on certain factors, according to a recent article published in the journal Psychological Science.

As we’ve reported before, people tend to look for scary movies, horror novels, or haunted houses — and not just during the Halloween season. This tendency is referred to in the academic literature as ‘recreational anxiety’: a ‘mixed emotional experience of fear and pleasure’. This new study focuses less specifically on recreational anxiety and more on gaining a better understanding of the biological systems involved in various fear responses in humans, according to lead author Sarah Tashjian, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Caltech.

Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University, author of Why horror seduces, conducted his own research on two different anxiety-regulating strategies used by subjects who attended a Danish haunted house: “adrenaline junkies,” who lean into fear; and “white knuckles”, who try to suppress their fear. A 2020 study from Clasen’s lab found that the startle factor has to be just right to achieve that crucial mix (a “Goldilocks zone” or “sweet spot” of subjective pleasure). Clasen’s core hypothesis is that horror takes advantage of the evolved fear system.

A 2020 study by Finnish scientists reinforced Clasen’s hypothesis. They used an MRI to map subjects’ neural activity while the subjects were watching horror movies: the 2010 movie in particular. treacherous and 2016 The incantation 2† They focused on two kinds of fear: that creeping sense of doom in a ghostly environment, and the instinctive shock response we have to an unexpected sudden appearance of a monster or other threat (a startle response). The Finnish team found that during the previous scenarios, there is a marked increase in brain activity in terms of visual and auditory perception. In the sudden shock scenarios, there was increased brain activity in regions involved in processing emotions, evaluating threats and making decisions, in order to better respond quickly to perceived threats.

In many ways, a haunted house is the perfect lab simulation. “We can’t invite people into the lab, hide behind a cover, then jump out and say ‘Boo!’ call,” Clasen told Ars in 2019. It’s unethical, to begin with, but also less compelling. And it turns out that immersion is the key to instilling fear.

Clasen equipped his subjects with heart rate monitors, while Tashjian’s subjects wore wristbands that measured sweat-induced changes in their skin conductance levels and responses. “We conceptualize our work on anxiety a little differently,” Tashjian also said. Clasen and his lab are investigating why people like fear-inducing events like haunted houses and scary movies as a source of entertainment. Our interest in social behavior during a threatening event like the haunted house arose from animal work on risk dilution, where animals showed a reduction in fear responses when they are in larger groups. We wanted to test if the same was true for people in intense threat.”

That said, Tashjian’s study complements Clasen’s work for 2020. “Our data uses data on electrodermal activity, which is a measure of sympathetic nervous system activity, while [Clasen and his colleagues] used heart rate data as a measure of parasympathetic nervous system activity,” she said. “Together, these studies contribute to a better understanding of stress-related physiology using fear induction than either study alone.” Both studies also combined the objective physiological measures with subjective measures. self-reports of threat generation and found that people (or at least the subjects) were relatively accurate when it comes to self-reporting their fear-based experiences.

“Our study was developed in response to a growing desire to identify contextual and endogenous factors associated with sympathetic nervous system responses to potential threats,” Tashjian told Ars. “This work has both social and clinical relevance for understanding threat responses. For example, fear is associated with decreased inhibition of threat responding to security, as well as generalizing threat responses to stimuli that are perceptually similar to threats, but are safe stimuli themselves. Our study identifies contextual factors that could exacerbate these processes (i.e., being in groups, unexpected anxiety events).”

The 17th Door haunted house is the brainchild of a husband-and-wife team named Robbie and Heather Luther, who run a professional production company. As the name implies, there are 17 different rooms, each with a different kind of terror (or threat, for the purposes of the study). The most recent narrative frame revolves around a woman named Paula, an inmate at Perpetuum Penitentiary for the murder of her son. She fights for her redemption against the sadistic guard and accompanying henchmen. The whole experience takes about 30 minutes.