Coltan Scrivner

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?

So we strapped people with heart rate monitors, right?

And we thought, okay, if we can measure what their hearts are doing, what our bodies are doing when they're having fun, maybe we can tease apart how they're having fun.

And then we put up cameras throughout the haunt at different scary points to see what their faces were doing.

Were they screaming?

Were they laughing?

Were they looking surprised?

And what's cool about this one is, especially at the time, this would have been in 2017, probably.

Halloween was still kind of fairly new in Denmark as a event.

They knew what Halloween was, but they didn't really have haunted attractions.

If I wanted to go to a haunted attraction in LA right now, I could walk out the door and find a bunch of them.

Yeah, of course, it's a huge one.

In Denmark, there weren't a lot of them.

We had to drive an hour from the university just to find this one, and it was one of the first.

It was so fun driving to this.