I love horror movies – whether it be ghosts or monsters, gore or suspense – but I have plenty of friends who would rather do just about anything else than watch a masked man with a chainsaw. What is it that draws some people towards activities meant to scare, like horror movies or haunted houses, but makes others run screaming?
What happens in our brain when we are afraid?
Our response to scary situations is often described as our “flight-or-fight” response. In a scary situation, our body can produce adrenaline (which can lead to great feats of strength otherwise not possible under tamer circumstances) and groups of hormones called endorphins (also linked to exercise and positive mood enhancement).
A 2008 study in the Journal of Neurology also found that flooding the brain with dopamine is also linked to behaviors suggestive of fear and paranoia in rats. Since dopamine is also associated with pleasure, its release in scary situations, along with a so-called “rush” of adrenaline and endorphins can lead to an elevated mood or high. Some people enjoy this high more than others.
Most people do not actually want to live through a terrifying or traumatizing ordeal. The key difference with experiences like scary movies, haunted houses, and even roller coasters is that our brain can quickly process the threat and determine that it is not “real.” So if our senses trigger a fear response, for example if we suddenly feel the floor drop out from under us on an amusement park ride, our brain can immediately recognize that we are not in any real danger but are instead in a safe, controlled environment.
Although psychologists have not identified a “fear center” in the brain, the amygdala, nestled between the temporal lobes, appears to be involved in how we process scary situations or threats. Animals with amygdala damage are observed to be tamer and have less of a flight-or-fight response. Neural activity is also observed in the human amygdala, along with increased heart rate, when threats are introduced. Evidence for the dominant role in fear response played by the amygdala was further found in a 1995 study in the Journal of Neuroscience of a woman known as “SM” with a rare genetic disorder, Urbach-Wiethe disease, which caused her amygdala to harden and shrink. Not only could “SM” not recognize fearful expressions, she also showed no signs of fear in typically scary situations like haunted houses or when surrounded by venomous snakes.
See Also: Why Do We Like to Be Scared?
Is fear innate or learned?
Some fears are innate, like the fear that tells you not to jump off that platform, even though you know you are safely tied to a bungee cord that will keep you from hitting the ground. We depend on these fears for our survival. However, we can also be conditioned to fear things that otherwise would not be scary.
In 1920, psychologists found empirical evidence that fear can be learned in what is known as the Little Albert experiment. An otherwise emotionally stable 9 month old baby referred to as “Albert” was conditioned to be afraid of furry objects in much the same way Pavlov experimented with dogs. Every time the child was given a white rat to play with, the experimenters banged loudly on a steel bar with a hammer from a position out of the baby’s sight. The poor child, who was previously unafraid of the rat, soon became very distressed every time the rat was reintroduced. Little Albert even appeared to transfer this fear to other furry objects, including a rabbit, a seal-skin coat, and the beard on a Santa Claus mask.
If you are appalled by the idea of terrifying a baby in the name of science, rest assured that such an experiment would never pass an ethics test now. Modern standards do not allow tests with such a high risk of long term psychological damage. Also, although of course less importantly, the experiment was not designed to include a control subject for comparison, nor did any follow up occur with Little Albert after the experiments ended when he was ~ 1 year of age.
Our fears can also depend on personal childhood experience. For example, a child who has been attacked by a dog at a young age may continue to be afraid of dogs later in life. When our emotions run high, the chemicals released by our brain can work to build stronger memories of the situation, like vivid snapshots of our surroundings at the time. This is the same effect at work when we remember exactly where we were or what we were doing the moment we hear at item of bad news.
So if we can be conditioned to fear certain things, our cultural upbringing must dictate to some extent what we are afraid of. Fears often play on the same theme, like the unnatural, but those unnatural beings may take on different forms, whether it be the undead, demons, or ghosts and will vary with geography and over time.
For example, in Central and South America stories of the chupacabra, a beastly creature that feeds off the blood of livestock, have been common since the first reported sighting in Puerto Rico in the mid 1990s, but the spiny, reptilian creature is not well-known in other countries.
Culturally influenced fears change over time as well. Earlier horror films, for example, would have been considered frightening due to subtle use of confused perspective (like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 1919) or shadow and light (as in Nosferatu in 1922. Now that directors have many more tricks up their sleeve including CGI and, well, color, audiences demand a lot more from their scary visual effects. Dating back even farther, freak shows were also once considered scary. Audiences were dared to look upon human oddities like bearded ladies or so-called “living dolls”. Thankfully, the idea of gawking at someone because they are different is pretty appalling by today’s social norms.
What are people's top fears?
A now dated 2001 Gallup poll of > 1,000 adults in the US found that the most commonly held fear (51% of participants) was the fear of snakes. (I agree!) Public speaking, heights, confined spaces, and spiders/insects rounded out the top five fears. Responses also varied by gender, with women being more likely to be afraid of reptiles and insects but men being more likely to fear going to the doctor, and by race, with white people being more afraid of public speaking than people of color, for example.
A more recent (but less controlled) crowd-sourced survey conducted by Yahoo of > 20,000 volunteers amongst its users found slightly different results 14 years later. The top three phobias were acrophobia (fear of heights), arachnophobia (fear of spiders), and claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces). Also in the top ten: thalassophobia (fear of deep water), glossophobia (fear of public speaking), and trypanophobia (fear of needles). Trypophobia (the fear of objects with irregular patterns of holes) and lepidopterophobia (the fear of butterflies) were also in the top 20.
Whether you enjoy being scared or not, have a happy and safe Halloween and check out my earlier episode on what experiments you can do with all of that leftover candy!
Until next time, this is Sabrina Stierwalt with Everyday Einstein’s Quick and Dirty Tips for helping you make sense of science. You can become a fan of Everyday Einstein on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, where I’m @QDTeinstein. If you have a question that you’d like to see on a future episode, send me an email at everydayeinstein@quickanddirtytips.com.
Images courtesy of shutterstock
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