Is there a right age to, I guess, expose your children to something terrifying or should parents start jumping out at them at a certain age and having a bit of fun with them?

The research on that is pretty new.

So I'd be hesitant to make any really strong claims.

What has been found and some of it, some of the most interesting work is actually stuff that other people have done.

So for example, a group called the Games for Emotional and Mental Health Lab.

I think they have a lab in Canada and they have a lab in the Netherlands as well.

they have created this game for children who have been diagnosed with clinical anxiety.

The psychopathy literature is really, really

Who are the people in these three groups?

Yeah, so this research project came out of the idea that People who like scary things, people who like horror movies in particular, must like it for the sensations, right? And that didn't quite seem right to me because, well, for one, a horror movie is not really the best way to get a kick of adrenaline.

If you really want to get a kick of adrenaline, you would go skydiving or bungee jumping or buy a motorcycle.

There are a lot of ways that you can get a much... higher adrenaline kick than watching a movie in your house.

And so some colleagues and I teamed up and we came up with about 50 or 60 different responses that people had written or talked about, about why they like horror.

And we gave these responses to hundreds of people and we asked them, how much do you agree with each of these? And what we found is that people's answers tended to lump into three categories or three types.

And one of those types was the sort of adrenaline junkie, right? That high sensation seeker horror fan.

Can you paint a picture of the place for me and describe for me what happened?

Who are the people in these three groups?

Yeah.

So this research project came out of the idea that people who like scary things, people who like horror movies in particular, must like it for the sensations, right? And that didn't quite seem right to me because, uh, well, for one, you know, a horror movie's not really the best way to get a kick of adrenaline.

If you really wanna get a kick of adrenaline, you would go skydiving or bungee jumping or, you know, buy a motorcycle.

There are a lot of ways that you can get a much higher adrenaline kick than watching a movie in your house.

And, uh, and so some colleagues and I teamed up, and we came up with, uh, about 50 or 60 different responses that people had written or talked about, about why they like horror.

And, uh, we f- you know, gave these responses to hundreds of people, and we asked them, you know, "How, how much do you agree with each of these?" And what we found is that people's answers tended to lump into three categories or three types, and one of those types was the sort of adrenaline junkie, right? That high sensation seeker horror fan, and those people enjoy horror for the sensations that they get from it.

So Colton, we've talked about some of the benefits of morbid curiosity, but does the research bear out Yeonhee's experience that it can also have negative consequences?

Yeah.

Fast-forward to humans, we have language, transmissible culture, we tell stories.

What does that allow us to do? Well, it allows us to retain almost all of the learning benefit of a situation, but remove virtually all the cost.

And we can envision future scenarios that we've never encountered, or maybe variations of a scenario.

What if this happened in the woods versus the savanna versus the lake? And so, stories allow us to very, very cheaply simulate potential situations, in many cases, potentially dangerous situations, that might happen to us at some point.

Maybe we heard about a story and then we tell a fictional version of it to amp that up a little bit.

It was a wolf.

Do you think it could alleviate some of the fear that parents have when their kids are playing video games?

Let's kind of walk through each of those categories.

There seem to be about four categories, four broad categories of morbid curiosity.

So those are, uh, the minds of dangerous people, so this is an interest in sort of the thinking behind someone who is violent or dangerous.

Why are they doing the things they are doing? What are their justifications? How did they get this way? And that's really good if you know about that for predicting who might be violent or if you're interacting with someone who is violent.

A second one, which sounds closely related but is actually a bit different, is an interest in violence itself.

So this is an interest in the act of violence.

This would be, you know, what the Romans were experiencing when they go to the Colosseum or what you experience if you go to an MMA match or a boxing match.

And so how did researchers wind up testing that?

Mm.

Anxiety, depression, maybe like existential questions they have about death or what, what happens after.

Um, and so we had these three, uh, categories, and then we translated them into Danish.

We took them to a haunted attraction in Denmark, uh, the most extreme place you could think if you're a horror fan, right? That's where you should see nothing but adrenaline junkies because it's like this high-sensation experience.

But when you translate it into Danish, new language, new culture, high-intensity place, what you found is that you still had three groups, but only a small portion of them were adrenaline junkies.

Even at the haunted house, we had a bunch of white-knucklers and a bunch of people who were dark copers.

And when we talked to them afterwards, we said, "Hey, you know, you were scared of this.

Hmm

Are there different domains of morbid curiosity? Are there diff- different categories or types?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that was one of the first things I did, right? So if you're a psychologist, you're studying this, uh, new concept, or at least new to the- to academics concept.

One of the first things you do is, well, how can I easily measure it, right? Well, one way to- one way to easily measure something as a psychologist is to have a survey or a questionnaire, you know, like the Big Five or disgust sensitivity scale or psychopathy scale, or any number of ways to measure these different traits.

And, uh, there really was no scale to measure morbid curiosity.

So what I did is I collect a bunch of items from people from, um, different forums, like online forums, from interviews, from sort of your own theoretical grounding about, uh, different scenarios that might, uh, elicit interest that are- that have a threat involved.

And you collect all of those together and you have a bunch of people, a bunch of participants say how likely they would be to be interested in this thing if it were to happen to them.

Mm-hmm.