Short Wave - Like Being Scared? Here’s Why

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Like haunted houses? Scientists do! That’s because they’re an excellent place to study how humans respond to – and even actively seek out – fear. In an immersive threat setting, as opposed to a carefully controlled lab, researchers can learn a lot about what scares people, why and how additional factors (like the presence of friends) might affect our experiences.So what have they learned? What determines a good scare versus a bad one? And what’s the evolutionary reason for all of this, anyway? In today’s episode, producer Hannah Chinn heads to the haunted house in search of answers.Have a seasonal science question you want us to investigate on the next Nature Quest? Email us your question at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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And thanks to you listening for taking a sec to also leave us a review. you and share us with your friends. All right, on to the show. You're listening to Shortwave, from NPR. Hey, Sherwavers, Regina Barber here, joined by producer Hannah Chin. Hey, Han.

Hey, Gina. Okay, so I have a confession to make. Okay. I used to be a huge scarty cat. Okay. I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of big dogs. I was afraid of scary movies.

You name it. I was afraid of it. Um, Han, I am still that way. But I think anyone who knows you knows that that's not true for you anymore. Like, what happened to help you with your fears? So partially, it was growing up. And honestly, partly, it was this one job that I worked right after college at a haunted house. I would not have done that. It was so much fun. Like, possibly the most fun job I will ever have. Sorry to NPR. So much so that I actually dragged a group of my friends

all the way to Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to go visit the same haunted house. So this place is a historic site. It's called Eastern State Penitentiary. It's like in northeast Philadelphia. And it used to be this massive prison. It stopped operating in the 70s officially. And now it's a museum during the day. It's a museum about the history of the criminal justice system.

And then at night, it's a haunted house. It sounds terrifying. But I guess that's the point. No, totally. But Gina, for what it's worth, I'm not the only one who loves haunted houses. Do you know who also loves them? Who? Scientists. Okay.

Because they're a really ideal place to study fear. Typically, when we study things in the lab, we're exposing people to these repeated sort of low-intensity experiences. And that's not really the way we experience threat in the real world. So haunted houses have a benefit in that there are these really immersive experiences that have all of these sensations going on at the same time. So this is Sarah Tasjin. She's a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and she studies threat perception in the brain and the body. Basically, she wants to know how humans respond to fear. What's great about the haunted house experience is that it's still ethically acceptable because people are consenting to go. So rather than as

exposing somebody to something that might actually cause them long-term harm, we get this really unique opportunity to study these sort of real threats in the real world, but without torturing people outside of their permission. And what she's saying is kind of what all of the other scientists that I talked to told me as well, that haunted houses are this really unique environment where we can observe how humans respond to fear in the real world. So today on the show, The Science of Scaring. We're covering why people want to be scared in the first place, how social dynamics can affect how people perceive that scare, and what all this tells us about ourselves and others.

Happy early Halloween. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Hans, so this time of year, I imagine there's a lot of our like Halloween loving listeners and they're planning their costumes, they're buying candy, watching movies. In my case, you know, nightmare before Christmas,

that's when this season starts. The spirit of the season, though, is thrills, right? Totally. And this combination of fear and fun, And scientists say it's a little bit counterintuitive. If you look at almost any textbook for first semester psychology students, it will tell you that fear is an evolved emotion that is designed to keep us away from stimuli that might harm us in some way.

But then when you look at, you know, the world, humans spend so much money and resources and time pursuing precisely feeling this emotion. And it's clear that the knowledge. we have about fear is not the full story. So this is Mark Mammlolf Anderson. He's a cognitive behavioral scientist and he's also the co-director of the recreational fear lab in Arhus, Denmark. And Mark and his colleagues want to understand more about why we pursue fear. So a few years back, they studied visitors at this haunted attraction in Denmark called Dystopia. Mark told me it's set in this old factory in the middle of the woods. Oh my gosh. No. And the researchers put heart monitors on the visitors.

observed as they went through their attraction. And then at the end, they asked them about their experience. Like, how fun was it? How excited were you, et cetera. So what did they learn? Well, when they looked at all of the data, they found something that they called the inverted U-curve or this sweet spot of fear and enjoyment. So imagine like a rainbow shape of a graph or a figure where low amounts of fear resulted

in low amount of enjoyment, but so did very high amounts of fear. That also resulted in a low amount of enjoyment. On the top of the rainbow, so to say, was where you'd find the highest level of enjoyment. Okay, so this is like a Goldilocks, like region of enjoying fear. Like, not too tame, not too scary, like just right. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And just to be clear, where this sweet spot is differs for everyone. Plus, each person's individual sweet spot can change with time.

Mark told me when he's explaining it to people, he often uses the analogy of chili peppers. Some people can only eat jalapenos and everything above that is too strong, but as soon as you eat more and more and more chili pepper, you sort of get accustomed. So on one hand, consuming horror might also push your individual

individual sweet spot. Yeah, I mean, I like spicy food a lot, but my spice tolerance is actually lower than my kids. Like, we're both working on it. Hey, we're all on our own journey. One interesting thing that Mark mentioned is that younger people overall report much higher and more intense types of fear than older people in response to threat stimuli. So there's a pretty linear relationship where the older you are, the higher your scare threshold tends to be. How do haunted house creators cater to that, like, individual sweet spot? Mostly by thinking about what makes a good.

good or bad scare. I mean, that's what Margie Kerr does all day. I think a lot about how our body responds to different sensory experiences and ways to balance different types of scares. Markey is a sociologist and an author who teaches the University of Pittsburgh, and she's also a professional consultant on haunted houses. So she gets paid to work on haunted houses. Yeah. Wow. Different sounds, different lights, different smells, different sensory experiences that keep you in the moment and also a little bit off balance, you know, really kind of building that sense of good stress and anxiety and anticipation to find out what's going to happen next. And Gina, if you listen, the words that she's using, like stress or anxiety or anticipation,

honestly, even excitement or suspense, these are all different words that we use to describe what is often kind of the same feeling physiologically, right? when your heart beats faster and your palms start to sweat and you feel like you have butterflies in your stomach. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, even for people like me who like don't regularly go to haunted houses or watch horror movies, that feeling can happen, right? Like during a speech, job interview, or God forbid, like jumping out of a plane, though I know like many people like this for some reason. Yeah. So this kind of thing is called an arousal response. And one of Margie's co-researchers, he's a neuroscientist and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

his name's Greg Siegel. And he said this arousal response is really key to the whole scare experience. Arousal, that is not being calm. It doesn't matter whether it's positive or negative. It's the same brain structures that come online to say, gosh, this is important. This is salient. This is maybe threatening or maybe very rewarding. So we can make decisions about what to do with it.

And every time that we get scared or excited, we're kind of exercising this arousal, And then it's like, what do you do with that? Exactly. And Greg says it's less like a spectrum where we have negative emotions on one side and then positive emotions on the other. He described our feelings as more of a globe where low arousal is at the bottom and high arousal is on the top. And everything meets up at the North Pole, which is why we laugh at funerals and we have cute aggression. It's so cute, I just want to squeeze it. And you wouldn't have explanations for why all of these things are so.

together and indistinguishable and compelling unless they're very similar at those high levels of reactivity. Yeah, I don't think this is how the average person really thinks about emotion. Yeah, totally. I mean, this is definitely not how I think about my emotions. But Margie says this model could help us understand why people seek thrills. It's a lot like team sports. You know, you've come together, you've won, you have worked really hard and your body feels that work because it was brought up to that high level of arousal, and then you can relax. And then you have that satisfaction of, you know, feeling like you have really overcome something very scary, very challenging. Yeah, I like that she brought up this idea of shared experience because I feel like so far our

conversation has been, like, based mostly on individual people and how they perceive fear and fun. But for me, so much of if it's fun, and I'm not so much. scared depends on like the other people I'm with. That's true for me too. And Dina, I think that's really important because there's scientific evidence to show that your experience with fear is very much affected by the people that you're with. Really? Yes. So both Mark and Sarah, who's the neuroscientist you heard from at the very beginning of the episode, they've independently studied the ways that social dynamics influence people's experience at haunted houses. And both of their studies found that going through with a friend or even a group of friends

has this really big impact. So in Mark's research, he and his colleagues found that people's heart rates synced up when they were experiencing something they found scary with their friends, right? And overall, those people said they found the experience more scary than if they'd gone by themselves or with strangers. And in Sarah's research, which was based in a haunted house in California called the 17th door, she also found that the more friends you had in your group, the higher your arousal response, which is kind of surprising. Right? Because it's the opposite of what other animals experience. There's something called risk dilution where having more friends equals less risk. Because animals think that someone else is going to get eaten. But instead, our friends are mirroring our emotions. Yeah, I mean, this makes sense. Like when you see people happy, it makes you happy. And when I see people cry, I cry.

Exactly. And Mark said this too. There's also studies conducted on this where, you know, people have to eat a piece of chocolate. But if they're eating it with someone else who also thinks it's a really nice piece of chocolate, then the chocolate seems to taste better. So we have observed these social enhancing effects in other studies as well. And that might be what we are observing here as well. This is fascinating, but it still doesn't tell me why people like you like getting scared for fun and I don't. Yeah, and that's the fun part, right?

Scientists still don't exactly know. But they have a lot of theories. Like, Greg seems to lean towards the idea that humans pursue fear because they're pursuing the sense of arousal and maybe the calm that's released after that arousal. He told me experiencing something scary in a haunted house can kind of reset your baseline and make other things in the real world feel more manageable. Okay, so this is like putting things into perspective. Okay, so like getting an email from your boss may be less scary if you're comparing it to like getting chased by zombies. Exactly. Whereas Mark leans towards thinking of it as a learning experience, like this kind of training ground for new situations. You are being exposed to an unpredictable situation. That's kind of like the hallmark of what horror does.

But then all that unpredictability is turned into predictability. In other words, you learn. And Margie Kerr, the sociologist, says, honestly, it could be all of the above. Fear is not this one thing. You know, who we're with, what we're doing, what time of year, of that comes into play. And so sometimes fun is scary. Sometimes positive can even feel sad. You know, it's really so dependent on context. Oh, I do like that. Our experience of everything is really dependent on context. Han, thank you so much for bringing us the story. Thanks so much for having me, Gina. This episode was produced by Brother McCoy and edited by a showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez,

was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our vice president of podcasting. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.