Horror!
The Wall Street Journal, the other day, touted the values of the season of horror surrounding Halloween.
Lots of people take the deliberate step to scare themselves with scary movies and TV shows, spooky novels and videogames, true crime podcasts, haunted-house attractions and so on.
Apparently all of this has significant benefits!
Declared WSJ:
Fear, or the emotional response to a threat (real or perceived), exists to alert us to danger. When we’re scared, our sympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of our fight or flight response, floods our body with adrenaline and our brain with neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine, which can lift our spirits and energy.”
As long as those subjects are aware that there is no actual threat, of course, and that all this is make-believe.
Researchers from the Recreational Fear Lab (yup!) at Aarhus University, Denmark, and others from the University of Chicago and Penn State claimed that “recreational fear” made one “more psychologically resilient”: “Pandemic Practice: Horror fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals are More Psychologically Resilient During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published in Personality and Individual Differences last year.
They write:
One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds.”
Said the master of that genre, Stephen King:
A good horror story is one that functions on a symbolic level, using fictional (and sometimes supernatural) events to help us understand our own deepest real fears.”
Senior author of the article, Prof. Mathias Clasen, director of the aforementioned lab:
It’s similar to putting a fighter pilot into a simulator. You learn what the emotions feel like and how to control them.”
Doing something scary for fun helps people manage their real-life fears by teaching them how to titrate, regulate, and calibrate their reactions. And nope, those scary activities don’t have to be violent, gory, or sensational. Even a good-old ghost story can do the trick.
True life is worse!
Hear, God, my voice, in my lament;
from terror of the enemy preserve my life.
Hide me from the secret counsel of evil ones,
from the tumult of doers of harm,
who have sharpened their tongue like a sword;
they aimed the arrow of the bitter word
to shoot the blameless from hiding places—
suddenly they shoot at him, and they do not fear.
They strengthen themselves [for] an evil purpose;
they calculate to set snares covertly;
they say, “Who will see them?”
They conceive injustices: “We have perfected a well-conceived conception,
for the inward thought and heart of a person are deep.”
Psalm 64:1–6
But there is a God!
But God will shoot them with an arrow—
suddenly they are wounded.
And Yah[weh] will make [them] stumble on their own tongue;
all who see them will shake their head.
Psalm 64:7–8
And then the right kind of “fear” will come about: the fear of Yahweh!
Then all mankind will fear,
and they will proclaim the doing of God,
and His works they will understand.
Psalm 64:9
I was taken by recommendation made by Prof. Clasen (director of the Fear lab) on how to titrate, regulate, calibrate those scare reactions that make you more psychologically resilient: Make it a group venture!
He was right.
The righteous one rejoices in Yahweh,
and seeks refuge in Him;
and they will praise—all the upright of heart.
Psalm 64:10
Together the Deliverer from horror will be praised, … in a group venture!
SOURCE:
Wall Street Journal; Personality and Individual Differences