Coltan Scrivner

And I started thinking, well, it is kind of weird that humans also expose themselves to things that scare them.

Willingly.

Horror movies.

or true crime or whatever it might be, haunted houses, haunted hotels.

And I thought, well, I wonder if that's related.

And so I started looking into the literature and no psychologists were researching this.

Nobody that studied human behavior empirically was doing this work.

And that seemed insane to me because it's something that is so common, again, not just in our culture, but in every culture that we have documented.

I found one guy who was interested in this and he was a literature scholar and he studied horror literature and he lived in Denmark.

That feels right that he lived in Denmark.

Yeah, they're dark.

Scandinavians, yeah.

So I reached out to him and I said, hey, you are the only person in the world I can find who is interested in this topic and I'm interested in this.

We should do something together.

And he said, yeah, you should come to Denmark.

I would love to do a study at this haunted house.

Empirical studies aren't really my forte, but he had a good theoretical idea for what might be going on.

So we teamed up and I skipped some important tests that I was supposed to take during my PhD and flew to Denmark for a month and...

We did this incredible study at a haunted house.

This first study was we wanted to know how do people have fun when they are feeling afraid?