Watching horror sights isn’t a cup of tea for everyone. The sudden appearance of a ghost in Conjuring or a gentle tap on our shoulder by our classmate made us close our eyes for a moment. A bad dream or complete darkness at night has made us wonder why we react in such a way after seeing or imagining those scenes. Maria Gendron, a postdoctoral researcher in Barrett’s Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at the Northeastern University, puts forward a better explanation of this. She asserted, “One of the well-established, basic principles that make things scary is uncertainty.”
In a haunted house designed by University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett, a wide-eyed skeleton statue perched on a table in the corner of a dank stone-walled basement follows visitors with its eyes. They aren’t sure if it’s a plastic dummy or a human until the ghoul suddenly lunges from its post and claws the air as the innocents scurry into the next room. A disembodied head sitting on a mad-scientist’s platter pleads by silently mouthing the words “help me” as visitors pass into another room of the old basement is what terrorises the visitors to the brim. For the year 2004, Barrett’s family along with her lab’s full-time research staff which uses experiential, behavioural, psychophysiological, and brain-imaging techniques to study what emotions are and how they work have been scaring locals using everything they know about the science of emotion.
Remaining completely still until the moment of fright is what the team of researchers-as-monsters do to cultivates doubt and ambiguity. Gendron elucidated that the amygdale part of the brain is imperative for fear and many other emotions which is highly sensitive to the sclera or the white part of a human eyeball. Gendron claims, “The ghouls use this knowledge to their advantage by slowly widening their eyes and fixing their gaze on visitors to gradually reveal themselves as living creatures.”
Harminder Singh