Coltan Scrivner

Emotional exposure therapy.

And that was their heart rate and their expectation of how they rated it, how scary it was.

I've done a couple of studies at this haunted house.

Okay.

And we tried answering that question a little later.

We didn't use biochemical measures in part because this would have been 2021 and people were still a little weird about spitting in tubes.

And that's usually how you measure things like cortisol.

But what we did do is there was this idea for a long time that people like horror movies because the adrenaline, it's intuitive.

makes sense, seems true, probably is true.

But I thought, well, that doesn't really explain all of the horror fans.

Just anecdotally, I was like, well, I know a lot of people who are just not adrenaline junkies, but they love horror.

And so what I did is I collected 50 or 60 statements about why people like horror.

And I showed them to hundreds of people.

And I said, how much do you agree with these things?

And I wanted to see which questions were answered similarly.

And you can kind of group them into factors.

And what I found was there were three factors that kind of emerged from that data.

One of those factors was sort of an adrenaline junkie factor.

People who scored high in that liked horror because they like the way they feel when they're afraid.

They like the rush.