HORROR, PERSONALITY, AND THREAT SIMULATION 1

HORROR, PERSONALITY, AND THREAT SIMULATION1Horror, Personality, and Threat Simulation:A Survey on the Psychology of Scary MediaMathias Clasen1, Jens Kjeldgaard Christiansen1 and John A. Johnson212Department of English, Aarhus UniversityDepartment of Psychology, Pennsylvania State UniversityAuthor NoteMathias Clasen, Department of English, Aarhus University; Jens KjeldgaardChristiansen, Department of English, Aarhus University; John A. Johnson Department ofPsychology, Pennsylvania State University. Declarations of interest: none.This research was supported by a grant from Viborg Bolig- og Erhvervsudlejning.The funding source had no involvement in the study. Portions of the analysis were presented atthe annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Boise, Idaho, in 2017.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mathias Clasen,Department of English, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.Email: mc@cc.au.dk 2018, American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactlyreplicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite without authors'permission. The final article will be available, upon publication, via its DOI: 10.1037/ebs0000152

HORROR, PERSONALITY, AND THREAT SIMULATION2AbstractHorror entertainment is a thriving and paradoxical industry. Who are the consumers of horror,and why do they seek out frightening media? We provide support for the threat simulation theoryof horror, according to which horror media provides a form of benign masochism that offersnegative emotional stimulation through simulation of threat scenarios. Through an online surveyof genre use and preference as well as personality traits and paranormal beliefs (n 1070), wefind that sensation seeking and the fifth of the Big-Five factors, intellect/imagination, predictliking of horror and frequency of use. Gender, educational level, and age are also correlated withhorror liking and frequency of use (males show higher liking and more frequent use, whereasliking and use frequency are negatively correlated with educational level and age). People withstronger beliefs in the paranormal tend to seek out horror media with supernatural content,whereas those with weaker beliefs in the paranormal gravitate toward horror media with naturalcontent, suggesting that people seek out horror media with threatening stimuli that they perceiveto be plausible. While frightening media may be initially aversive, people high in sensationseeking and intellect/imagination, in particular, like intellectual stimulation and challenge andexpect not just negative but also positive emotions from horror consumption. They brave theinitially aversive response to simulate threats and so enter a positive feedback loop by whichthey attain adaptive mastery through coping with virtual simulated danger.Keywords: horror media, media psychology, benign masochism, sensation seeking,Big Five personality traitsPublic significance

HORROR, PERSONALITY, AND THREAT SIMULATION3The horror genre is paradoxically popular: why do people willingly seek out negative emotionalstimulation from such entertainment? One way to get a handle on this question is to ask whattype of person seeks out horror media, so we conduct a survey of personality traits, paranormalbeliefs, and horror preference and usage patterns. Our findings support the hypothesis that horrorcan function as adaptive threat simulation, which may be particularly attractive to individualswho desire emotional and intellectual stimulation.Horror, Personality, and Threat Simulation: A Survey of the Psychology of Scary MediaHorror entertainment is a thriving and paradoxical industry. People flock to horror films,buy horror novels, immerse themselves in horror video games, and visit haunted attractions to bescared witless (Clasen, 2017; Follows, 2017; Gunter, 2018). The paradox of horror entertainmentis that people are willingly exposing themselves to media that they know will trigger unpleasantemotions such as fear, shock, and terror (Carroll, 1990). Why do they do it, and who are theconsumers of horror?

HORROR, PERSONALITY, AND THREAT SIMULATION4The so-called paradox of horror has been approached from a variety of theoreticalperspectives. For example, researchers have applied Aristotle’s notion of catharsis to hypothesizethat consumers of horror cleanse themselves of negative emotion through exposure to horror(Weaver & Tamborini, 1996). Others have adopted Freudian psychoanalytic theory to suggestthat horror allows consumers to face repressed psychological material in disguise (Dumas, 2014;Schneider, 2004). We suggest that none of these ideas can dissolve the paradox of horror.Catharsis does not in fact seem to occur (as we show below, consumers of horror tend to becomemore anxious after exposure to horror, not less so), and key aspects of Freudian psychoanalytictheory have been argued to be scientifically questionable (Clasen, 2017; Daly & Wilson, 1990;Erwin, 1996).If we want to understand the appeal of horror, it is reasonable to ask who enjoys thegenre. Despite some early studies into the personality characteristics of horror consumers(reviewed in Hoffner & Levine, 2005)—mainly focusing on thrill-seeking, age, and genderdifferences in response—the personality profile of horror fans has not yet been adequatelyinvestigated. Nobody has rigorously investigated horror media consumption from the perspectiveof Big-Five personality traits, and researchers have neglected to integrate their findings withinthe powerfully explanatory matrix of evolutionary social science. Hence, this study has a dualobjective: First, we delineate who horror users are, and second, we integrate this characterizationwith an evolutionary theory of the function of horror.We conducted a survey of horror preference and personality on a North American samplepopulation (n 1070). In what follows, we analyze the proportion of horror fans to non-fans, thesocial context of horror, differences between audiences for supernatural and non-supernaturalhorror, and personality characteristics of horror consumers. We discuss the results of the survey

HORROR, PERSONALITY, AND THREAT SIMULATION5within a framework informed by evolutionary social science, suggesting that the paradoxicalappeal of horror is best explained as a form of benign masochism that may serve the adaptivefunction of threat simulation. According to the theory of benign masochism, pioneered by thepsychologist Paul Rozin (Rozin, Guillot, Fincher, Rozin, & Tsukayama, 2013; Rozin & Schiller,1980), initially aversive activities may through hedonic reversal become pleasurable. Examplesare ingesting chili peppers and listening to sad music. Steven Pinker has suggested a functionalunderpinning for the “paradoxical pleasures” of benign masochism:These paradoxical pleasures include consuming hot chili peppers, strong cheese, and drywine, and partaking in extreme experiences like saunas, skydiving, car racing, and rockclimbing. All of them are adult tastes, in which a neophyte must overcome a first reactionof pain, disgust, or fear on the way to becoming a connoisseur. And all are acquired bycontrolling one’s exposure to the stressor in gradually increasing doses. What they havein common is a coupling of high potential gains (nutrition, medicinal benefits, speed,knowledge of new environments) with high potential dangers (poisoning, exposure,accidents). The pleasure in acquiring one of these tastes is the pleasure of pushing theoutside of the envelope: of probing, in calibrated steps, how high, hot, strong, fast, or farone can go without bringing on disaster. The ultimate advantage is to open up beneficialregions in the space of local experiences that are closed off by default by innate fears andcautions (Pinker, 2011, p. 555).We agree with the adaptive logic proposed by Pinker. In the case of horror media, we argue thatthe attraction of horror is explicable in terms of an evolved pleasure response to threatsimulations. Horror media tend to imaginatively transport consumers into fictional universes thatbrim with danger, e.g. in the form of simulated monsters or fictional villains. Through such

HORROR, PERSONALITY, AND THREAT SIMULATION6imaginative absorption, people get to experience strong, predominantly negative emotions withina safe context. This experience, which serves as a way of preparing for real-world threatsituations, may be biologically adaptive in terms of improving the odds of survival in apotentially hostile world (Clasen, 2017). Moreover, such vicarious experience is likely to beespecially attractive to individuals with a certain personality profile—conceivably, those high insensation seeking and openness to experience.Based on these theoretical reflections and on existing research literature, we predict thatour study will replicate previous findings of a positive correlation between sensation seeking andhorror enjoyment. We also predict correlations between horror liking and age and gender, withyounger individuals and males showing higher preference for horror than older individuals andfemales, given that sensation seeking—a proximal mechanism for horror enjoyment—shows thatpattern. Our investigation of personality variables and horror preference is exploratory, but wepredict that extraversion will be related to a preference for experiencing horror with others.Gregarious individuals presumably find joy in sharing the emotional stimulation that horrorprovides. We predict that the fifth of the Big-Five personality factors, Intellect/Imagination (alsosometimes called Openness to Experience), will correlate with use of and preference for horrormedia, based on the assumption that horror provides emotional as well as intellectualstimulation. We also predict that higher paranormal beliefs will correlate with a preference for,and greater fright in response to, supernatural horror, given that the threat depicted in such horrorwill be perceived as more relevant by believers in the paranormal. Finally, whereas a catharsismodel would predict reduced negative affect after exposure to horror, we predict lingering fearafter horror as well as elicitation of positive emotions. Based on benign masochism theory, weexpect to find a co-activation of positive and negative emotion which should get increasingly

HORROR, PERSONALITY, AND THREAT SIMULATION7lopsided over time: Those who like horror media most should also experience the least frightfrom it, and prefer more extreme forms of horror to compensate.MethodWe used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing technology, which has beenextensively validated in cognitive science (Stewart, Chandler, & Paolacci, 2017), to recruit anadequately representative sample of American users and nonusers of horror media for oursurvey. Respondents accepted a survey with the title “Answer a survey about yourself and yourrelationship with horror media (15-20 minutes),” described as follows: “This is an academicsurvey about different people’s use of horror media. You need to be 18 years old or more to takethis survey, and you need a Google account. You do not need to use or enjoy horror media totake this survey.” The last sentence was included to avoid a biased sample of predominantlyhorror users, and as our results suggest, we did recruit non-users as well as users.This method gave us 1187 respondents. The survey covered: Personal details (e.g., sex, age, number of children, level of education) Tobacyk’s (2004) Paranormal Belief Scale (revised according to Lindeman & Svedholm,2012) Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (Hoyle, Stephenson, Palmgreen, Lorch, & Donohew,2002) Big-Five personality traits (50-item IPIP version of the Big-Five Factor Markers;Johnson, 2015) Items on respondents’ horror media uses, preferences, and experiences (dependentvariables):