In one study, scientists found that people who visited an intense scare house and experienced controlled fear had less brain activity in response to stimuli and felt less anxiety. This finding suggests that watching horror movies, listening to scary stories or playing suspenseful games can actually be… calming.
What’s more, Experiencing intense experiences of fear together strengthens bonds between people – just look at soldiers or firefighters, who are most often your closest friends. Because exposure to stress not only triggers the “fight or flight” response, but also often triggers a mechanism that psychologists call the “tend-and-befriend” system. It stimulates you to care for others and create social-emotional bonds for protection and comfort, all under the supervision of oxytocin, often called the happiness hormone.
As emphasized by prof. Kollat in his publication, experiences of fear can be a way to prepare for worst-case scenarios and the best example is probably the rise in popularity of films about epidemics, which gained popularity at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Viewing threat scenarios in a controlled way, through the media, allows us to better understand our fears and emotionally prepare for future dangers.
Researchers from the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark have shown that people who regularly watched horror movies were more mentally resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic than people who were not fans of the genre. The researchers suggest that this resilience may be due to some type of training that horror fans have received – they have practiced coping with the fear and anxiety that their favorite entertainment evokes and, as a result, have been better prepared to face real fear. In short, horror movies are good for your health!
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Source: geekweek.interia.pl
