Surfing uncertainty with screams: predictive processing, error dynamics and horror films

Abstract

Despite tremendous efforts in psychology, neuroscience and media and cultural studies, it is still something of a mystery why humans are attracted to fictional content that is horrifying, disgusting or otherwise aversive. While the psychological benefits of horror films, stories, video games, etc. has recently been demonstrated empirically, current theories emphasizing the negative and positive consequences of this engagement often contradict one another. Here, we suggest the predictive processing framework may provide a unifying account of horror content engagement that provides clear and testable hypotheses, and explains why a ‘sweet spot’ of fear and fun exists in horror entertainment. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’.

Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter

“…The first part of the issue, entitled “General Issues”, gathers contributions that clarify the conceptual bases of the encounter between PP and aesthetics and expand it in new directions [ 98 , 142 , 148 , 149 ]. The three parts that follow—devoted to “Visual Art” [ 63 , 123 ], “Music” [ 102 , 132 , 133 ] and “Literature, Narrative and Cinema” [ 56 , 95 , 96 , 125 ] respectively—offer an articulate picture of the insights that PP can provide when applied to different art forms (including some that have so far been little or never explored from a PP perspective), and what in turn these art forms, when considered from a PP perspective, can tell us about our mental functioning. The last part, entitled “Responses and Critical Perspectives” contains papers that compare the PP picture of our aesthetic encounters with other leading proposals in the field and provide useful criticisms and indications for future research [ 64 , 107 , 108 ].…”

“…But the same approach could in principle be extended to all the arts (see e.g. [93,123] for some preliminary suggestions about visual art, [53,94] about literature and [55,56,96] about cinema) and even beyond exteroceptive inference to embrace proprioceptive and interoceptive inference as well. By revealing systematic connections between aspects of our phenomenology and facts about neural dynamics, this line of research might well contribute to research in 'neurophenomenology' [124] and even inform theoretical discussions about consciousness from a PP perspective (see [64,125] for preliminary suggestions in this direction).…”

“…Psychologists and neuroscientists moving within the PP approach are starting to use this expertise for their theoretical and empirical work (see e.g. [55,56,97,[131][132][133]). Here again the insights of artists and aestheticians, complemented by the Bayesian apparatus of PP, promise to deliver fine-grained pictures of how feelings like confusion, surprise, curiosity, boredom, insight, etc., are generated, evolve over time, and can be managed by the sort of designer environments we humans build and inhabit.…”

“…Third, PP also allows us to model the dynamics of our engagement (thanks to its Bayesian apparatus) and to connect these dynamics with known facts about brain function (thanks to its hypotheses about neural implementation). More of course will have to be said about how exactly 'predictions' are involved in specific cases, but the work done so far seems at least to suggest that the PP apparatus is plastic enough to be applied productively to a wide variety of artforms, including visual art [50,51,57,93], music [52,54], literature [53,94,95], cinema, [55,56,96] and games [97].…”

“…This is indeed the direction that the growing stream of research on PP and aesthetics is taking. While PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding different artforms and aesthetic phenomena [50][51][52][53][54][55][56], the arts and aesthetics, examined under the PP lens, are starting to be seen as important windows into our mental functioning [45,52,57,58]. The result is a vast interdisciplinary research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest, including perception, cognition, learning, affect, motivation, well-being and the dynamics of subpersonal and personlevel experience.…”