The Psychological Benefits of Scary Play in Three Types of Horror Fans

Abstract

Abstract. Why do people seek out frightening leisure activities such as horror films and haunted attractions, and does the experience benefit them in any way? In this article, we address these questions through two separate studies. In Study 1, we asked American horror fans ( n = 256) why they like horror and identified three overall types of horror fans, which we term “Adrenaline Junkies,” “White Knucklers,” and “Dark Copers.” In Study 2, we collected data from Danish visitors at a haunted house attraction ( n = 258) and replicated the findings from Study 1 by finding the same three types of horror fans. Furthermore, we show that these three types of horror fans report distinct benefits from horror experiences. Adrenaline Junkies reported immediate enjoyment, White Knucklers reported personal growth, and Dark Copers reported both. These results suggest that frightening leisure activities are not only an outlet for sensation-seeking, and that the allure of horror may have as much to do with learning and personal growth as it has with high-arousal fun.

To read or not to read? Motives for reading negative COVID-19 news.

“…In addition to the factor knowledge, we found that the more participants anticipated that reading an article would be self-relevant (i.e., relevant to their own personal situation and helping them prepare for an emergency), the more often they chose to read the article. This finding is consistent with recent empirical findings (Abir et al, 2022; Scrivner et al, 2021, 2023) that demonstrate that personal utility may play a role in the choices that people make in their consumption of both news and entertainment. The finding that the anticipated self-relevance of information can predict decisions to engage with negative information concerning others sheds interesting light on some contrasting findings in the literature on curiosity and information seeking.…”

Bleeding-Heart Horror Fans

“…It is possible that some horror fans have different levels of empathy or compassion on average, even if this does not show up across rated enjoyment of subgenres. Scrivner et al (2022) recently identified three types of horror fans: adrenaline junkies, white knucklers, and dark copers. These three types of horror fans appear to be attracted to horror for different reasons and experience different psychological benefits from horror engagement.…”

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

“…Through a process of belief updating and embodied action, the brain acts to minimize any discrepancy between its predictions and its actual sensory states-a quantity known as 'prediction error'. 1 So long as the organism keeps the error in its predictions to a minimum over time, either through updating its predictions or by acting on the world to make it better fit the prediction, the organism will typically succeed in achieving the valued outcomes it aims for in acting [2][3][4][5][6][7].…”

“…This is a large part of our story, but it is not the whole story. Recent work suggests that we might enjoy horror films because they allow us to explore threatening situations, and so help us to transform our unpredictable reality into a more predictable one [32,33]. The monsters that are for us such a provocative source of fear and disgust are only the creative constructs of our imaginations, and appear only on the screens and pages of works we know to be fictional.…”