We’ve seen some startling examples of the negative impact of bullying on victims: media reports of suicide and attempted suicide by children, adolescents, and young adults in college. In addition, many personal accounts of misery and depression of those victims reach us seemingly daily. Yet, the issue persists, despite many attempts to change the way our schools operate and efforts to change our very cultural attitudes toward bullying.

I was reminded again about the topic of bullying after my recent read of The Cold Spot by J.G. Faherty. I found his use of bullying as a device for framing his horror novel to be rather unique and I enjoyed it immensely. As a psychologist and a professor, I am used to addressing bullying from those professional perspectives. I teach a graduate level course entitled Counseling Children and Adolescents, and one of the favorite topics is bullying. The reason, of course, is that the graduate students in our counseling program who are placed in settings (schools and clinics) where they work with kids often come face to face with this issue. Dealing with bullying is difficult. Circumstances vary across incidents, the situations and kids involved are often quite complex, and people (that is, adults) often don’t know how to address it.

I will continue with a discussion on bullying prompted by reading The Cold Spot in the next blog… 

If you’ve been reading the two previous blogs, I’ve been trying to summarize an article by Mathias Clasen entitled “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories” which was published in the Review of General Psychology in 2012. According to Clasen, “Horror stories trigger the evolved danger management systems.” Put another way, Clasen indicates that

“horror fiction capitalizes on cognitive and physiological machinery that is a product of natural selection”

The question remains why many people continue to like horror stories? If horror triggers our danger management systems unnecessarily, why do we seek them out?

Well, here is where it gets a little tricky. More importantly, at least as far as I am concerned, here is where psychology begins to play a huge role. There are two potential explanations:

1.      We can loosely categorize this along demographic lines: Target audiences for horror. In talking demographics, we also end up considering gender roles. The main target of horror movies and the biggest consumers are adolescent boys. Beyond the obvious fact that this group is a little on the goofy end of things to begin with, male adolescents often engage in behavior that has been considered rites of passage. Some of this is culturally sanctioned, other rituals are more informal. Regardless, going to scary movies together and surviving the horror together can be considered a male bonding experience (according to Clasen). “Hey, dude, we survived and we did it together” (although teen boys probably wouldn’t report it in this manner). At the same time, girls tend not to be the market audience, but are often taken to these movies by their dates (the guys who love them – the movies in this case, and maybe the girls). Now, according to Professor Clasen, teen girls like boys who are brave and boys like to reciprocate by being brave (that is, gender appropriate reactions to horror movies). If everything goes according to plan, both parties get their wish – and boys also get to watch a cool movie to boot. According to Clasen, this is known as the snuggle theory of horror. (Please, I’m just reporting his argument).

2.      The second explanation makes more sense to me. Basically, it is this: we vicariously learn how to behave in extremely dangerous situations in the relative safety of a movie theatre or our own homes while reading a book. The situation as portrayed on a screen (or in a book for that matter) is indeed well beyond the norm and highly life threatening – but it is fictional. As a result, we learn how to mentally prepare for and handle unbelievable situations without the risk. This process has its parallel in childhood play. Kids act out practical strategies of survival in all kinds of games and activities. Pretend play is fun and pleasurable – and kids are vicariously learning all kinds of behaviors which are applicable to real life in years to come: problem solving, negotiating, self-control, assertiveness, physical safety responses and so on.

To put it simply, enjoying horror stories allows us to practice survival strategies and to form bonds with other survivors – all within very low-risk situations. As Clasen states, consuming horror is adaptive – we learn new skills for survival and practice and rehearse them in thrilling and uncanny encounters that aren’t real. How cool is that?

What about the people who don’t like horror? Well, I suppose they’ll be relying on us to keep them safe during the upcoming apocalypse. It’ll be annoying, but what the heck – everyone will get a chance to snuggle.

Clasen, M. (2012). Monsters evolve: A biocultural approach to horror stories. Review of General Psychology, 16, 222-229.

I’ve been talking about an article by Mathias Clasen entitled “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories” which was published in the Review of General Psychology in 2012. In the previous blog, I summarized Clasen’s model that fear and anxiety are evolutionary adaptations to dangerous environments – these are the very emotions that help us deal with dangers… and they served our ancestors well.

This “threat-detection and handling system” has been deeply ingrained in our nervous system over hundreds of thousands of years (or however long we’ve been at this thing).  Professor Clasen says it far better than I can: “Human attention is preferentially engaged by evolutionary recurrent, fear-relevant stimuli”.  So, we’re wired to be frightened by snakes, large animals with fangs, and so on. Some psychologists also suspect we’re hard wired to fear being judged negatively by others. For our unlucky ancestors, being judged unworthy meant banishment from the clan or tribe. Banishment, in turn, meant death. Today, this fear translates into other modern fears of being judged negatively: public speaking, social anxiety, dating anxiety.

All by way of saying, we are preprogrammed to display emotional states of fear and anxiety to certain stimuli, because this reaction faired our ancestors well. However, we can’t go around with this vague response without it being adapted for our current culture. Therefore, the management system is constantly subjected to shaping and refinement to fit the local environment.

Now, as you may have guessed, horror stories fit nicely into threat-detection system. Monsters ghosts, serial killers, zombies, werewolves, vampires all qualify as something that we should react to in order to save our lives. Our reaction is unproductive, however, because books and movies are not a major threat to our survival. However, we have the reaction, the jolt anyway, and get to laugh about it later because, after all, we survived and that really couldn’t happen to us.  (By the way, versions of these monsters have been around forever. So, they are part of our psyche – whether they exist or not. We are on the lookout for these things – we’re programmed to do it…)

More on this topic in the next blog…

Why is there a market for horror? Why does a segment of the population gleefully submit themselves voluntarily to books and movies which are designed to frighten and unnerve them?

Why do educated people fall for this stuff?

I recently read a scholarly article by Mathias Clasen entitled “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories” which was published in the Review of General Psychology in 2012. (Full disclosure: I became aware of this article from the web site “This is Horror” which was citing a blog by the Huffington Post-UK which in turn was citing the Clasen article. Got that?) In this article, Professor Clasen attempts to answer these very questions, and I must say he does so in a most fascinating manner. I was rather skeptical before reading the piece; only because I expected some regurgitated psychobabble we’ve seen many times in the past on this topic. I was pleasantly surprised.

Professor Clasen posits a biocultural model whereby our reaction to and fascination with horror stories is the result of an evolutionary process combined with cultural adaptation. Let me try and summarize some of the main points:

According to Professor Clasen, we have a cognitive “architecture” designed for the management of danger. Our own evolution involved developing various adaptive survival strategies to cope with and survive threatening situations. Those strategies that weren’t helpful died out with our unlucky ancestors who died trying to use them.

As result of human evolution and evolutionary psychology, all of us are born with a wide range of adaptive strategies designed to help us survive and surmount a wide range of dangers. In simplest terms, we are all aware of the nearly instantaneous a flight or fight response at the slightest hint of danger.

The flight or fight response served our ancestors well when a rustling sound in the nearby bushes could be a saber-toothed tiger or an angry mammoth. Of course, these same reactions are less helpful today – we often don’t face life or death fears like our ancestors did at a moment’s notice. Nonetheless, we still have these intense reactions, and typically in the face of considerably milder dangers or no danger at all (for instance, in anticipation of giving a speech, taking a test, being alone, unhappy with our physical appearance). Unfortunately, these very reactions are the physiological basis of anxiety disorders – when we perceive threat and danger in harmless situations and react with fear and avoidance.

So, what has all of this to do with horror stories? Well the best is yet to come. Sadly, I’ve gone on much too long. I will resume this discussion in the next blog.