With Halloween right around the corner, scary movies and haunted houses are on everyone’s to do list. But what exactly makes these activities so appealing to us in the first place? HuffPost Science researched the reasons behind this and came up with five main causes for this.
The first reason is because fear keeps us from worrying about real life. When people are scared they are engrossed in the here and now that they do not have the capacity to consider what they have to do tomorrow. David Zald of Vanderbilt University explains that “Everyday life can feel routined and even boring. By contrast, when scared we are fully aware, conscious and in the moment.” The idea of having no worries about the past or future intrigues many people are keeps them coming back to scaring themselves.
Along with the idea that we are not worried about anything except the present is the chemicals that flood our brain while these activities are scaring us. Dopamine, Serotonin, endorphins and adrenaline are triggered when we are scared and allow influence brains and bodies. After we are scared, we then realize that we are safe, which brings us to the third reason of the feeling of confidence being scare allows people to feel. Once the scare is over, people feel invincible. Additionally, the accomplishments of our past feel more important and significant. Zald states that there is “nothing like jumping out of a plane to make you feel you can take on the world,” which is why people allow themselves to feel fear in the first place.
After feeling this fear, we are addicted to how it makes us feel. The mixture of chemicals and how they emotions they leave you with are engraved in your brain and people want to feel this “high” again, which is why people become adrenaline junkies. The feeling created from this fear is addictive, since it feels like a sort of high, with no drugs involved. More so, it makes us feel connected to the people we are with. Haunted Houses, scary movies and amusement parks are associated with friends and family, therefore they bring the feeling of togetherness. Dr. Margee Kerr, a Pittsburg based sociologist says that it can even make people seem more attractive to each other. After experiencing a scare, people misplace their high from the experience and instead attribute it to the people they experienced it with. This allows us to think that people are more interesting than they truly are, and brings people to feel like they have more of a connection to the person they are with.
With all of the benefits that being scared have, it is no wonder that people love amusement parks and scary movies, whether during Halloween, or any other time of the year. The high it brings is like no other, and is achieved with no substances besides the chemicals in your brain. By scaring ourselves, we become happier, and allow ourselves to see the true success our lives, which is more than enough reason to watch a scary movie the next time you have some free time on your hands.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/15/science-of-fear-why-we-love-to-scare-ourselves_n_5976266.html
So in my communications class we’ve been talking about fright and why people like to be scared. The theory basically suggested that people like being frightened because of the sense of relief that they feel afterwards, the relief is almost like a euphoric feeling that they experience. To some people they want to experience the fright because they want to experience this high state of euphoria. So maybe not just the high of fright but the high of the relief afterward !