Like Being Scared? Here’s Why

Summary

Short Wave – "Like Being Scared? Here’s Why"

NPR | Hosts: Regina Barber & Hannah Chin | Original Air Date: October 29, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the science of why people love being scared, particularly during Halloween. Hosts Regina Barber and producer Hannah Chin explore haunted houses as unique "fear laboratories," unpack the paradoxical fun of fright, and discuss how both individual psychology and social context shape our experiences with fear. Along the way, they hear from neuroscientists, sociologists, and cognitive scientists who use haunted attractions for cutting-edge research into human emotions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Journeys With Fear

• Hannah’s Confession:
  Hannah shares her transformation from childhood “scaredy cat” to haunted house enthusiast, even working at one after college.

  “I used to be a huge scaredy cat… I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of big dogs. I was afraid of scary movies. You name it, I was afraid of it.” — Hannah Chin (01:10)

• Her experience suggests we can adapt—and even learn to love—what once scared us.

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2. Haunted Houses as Unique Fear Laboratories

• Haunted Houses for Science:
  Scientists are fascinated by haunted houses because they offer a safe-yet-intense setting to study fear responses in real-world conditions.
  • Dr. Sarah Tasjan (University of Melbourne) explains:

    “Haunted houses have a benefit in that there are these really immersive experiences... it’s still ethically acceptable because people are consenting...” — Sarah Tasjan (02:39, 03:11)

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3. The Paradox and "Sweet Spot" of Fear

• Why Do We Seek Fear?
  Cognitive behavioral scientist Dr. Mark Mamdorf Anderson (Recreational Fear Lab, Denmark) questions why humans deliberately pursue frightening experiences:

  “If you look at almost any textbook… fear is an evolved emotion designed to keep us away from stimuli that might harm us… But… humans spend so much… time pursuing precisely feeling this emotion.” (05:28)

• "The Inverted U-Curve":
  Research shows enjoyment peaks at a "just right" fear level—too little or too much isn’t fun.

  “Low amounts of fear resulted in low amount of enjoyment, but so did very high amounts... On the top of the rainbow, so to say, was where you find the highest level of enjoyment.” — Mark Mamdorf Anderson (06:43)

• Chili Pepper Analogy:
  Like spice tolerance, our personal "sweet spot" for fear can change with experience.

  “On one hand, consuming horror might also push your individual sweet spot.” — Mark Mamdorf Anderson (07:35)

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4. Designing a Good Scare

• Sensory Balance & Anticipation:
  Sociologist Margie Kerr (University of Pittsburgh) consults on haunted house design, highlighting the importance of mixing different sensory stimuli.

  “Different sounds, different lights, different smells… building that sense of good stress and anxiety and anticipation…” — Margie Kerr (08:45)

• Physiology of Fear:
  The feelings of stress, excitement, suspense—the "arousal response"—are all linked physiologically.

  “Arousal that is not being calm... It’s the same brain structures that come online to say, gosh, this is important...” — Dr. Greg Siegel (09:54)

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5. Emotion as a Globe, Not a Spectrum

• Emotion Model:
  Dr. Greg Siegel describes emotions as a globe—with high arousal (positive or negative) at the "North Pole."

  “Everything meets up at the North Pole, which is why we laugh at funerals and we have cute aggression. It’s so cute, I just want to squeeze it...” — Greg Siegel (10:33)

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6. Social Dynamics: Fear Is Contagious

• Who You’re With Matters:
  Experiencing fear is affected by group context:
  • Heart Rate Sync: People’s heart rates synchronize with friends in haunted houses; they rate the experience as scarier when among friends. (12:08)
  • Arousal Response Higher in Groups: More friends = higher arousal, the opposite of “risk dilution” in animals.

    “Instead, our friends are mirroring our emotions.” — Sarah Tasjan (12:54)

  • Social Enhancement Extends to Other Experiences:

    “If they’re eating [chocolate] with someone else who also thinks it’s a really nice piece of chocolate, then the chocolate seems to taste better.” — Mark Mamdorf Anderson (13:06)

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7. Why Do Some People Love Scares? (And Others Don’t?)

• Theories Abound, Definitive Answers Elusive:
  • Arousal Reset:

    “Experiencing something scary in a haunted house can kind of reset your baseline and make other things in the real world feel more manageable.” — Greg Siegel paraphrased by Hannah (13:38)

  • Learning and Prediction:

    “All that unpredictability is turned into predictability. In other words, you learn.” — Mark Mamdorf Anderson (14:19)

  • Context-Dependent Experiences:

    “Fear is not this one thing… It’s, you know, who we’re with, what we’re doing, what time of year, all of that comes into play. And so sometimes fun is scary… It’s really so dependent on context.” — Margie Kerr (14:36)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This is like a Goldilocks… region of enjoying fear. Like, not too tame, not too scary, like, just right.”
  — Regina Barber (07:10)
• “It’s a lot like team sports. You’ve come together, you’ve won… your body feels that work… then you have that satisfaction of… overcoming something very scary, very challenging.”
  — Margie Kerr (11:07)
• On why people may chase scares:

  “He told me experiencing something scary in a haunted house can kind of reset your baseline and make other things in the real world feel more manageable.”
  — Hannah Chin on Dr. Greg Siegel’s theory (13:38)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Hannah’s Fear Journey & Haunted Houses as Science Labs:
  01:10–03:33
• The Paradox of Wanting Fear / The ‘Sweet Spot’:
  05:28–07:19
• Sensory Experiments & The Body’s Reaction to Scare:
  08:21–09:54
• Emotion Models & Shared Experience:
  10:11–12:08
• Social Contagion of Fear, Group Dynamics:
  12:08–13:29
• Why Some Love Scares (and Others Don’t), All About Context:
  13:38–14:52

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Episode Takeaways

• Haunted houses are perfect real-world places to study fear because they are immersive, safe, and ethically acceptable experiments.
• There’s a “just right” level of fear for maximum enjoyment, which is unique and changeable for everyone.
• Our physiological arousal response is central to the experience—our bodies can’t always distinguish between stress, excitement, or anticipation.
• Who you experience fear with matters—a lot! Shared emotions amplify both fear and fun.
• We seek frightening experiences to recalibrate our emotions, test new situations, and build camaraderie.
• Ultimately, context rules: Why and how we enjoy fear depends on personality, life stage, companions, and the environment.

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This summary covers the episode’s core discussions, research highlights, and includes memorable quotes with timestamps, preserving the lively and relatable tone of the Short Wave team.

Transcript

[Regina Barber]

NPR connects you to music you love and a community to share it with. That's a mission worth celebrating. It's Public Radio Music Day. Amplify the sound of this community with a donation [e-mail] and thank you. Short waivers. We have a free and quick favor to ask right now on the app or platform where you're listening. Leave us a rating or review if you. It really helps new listeners find our show. And I swear we read what people write. Like Elaw, who says this is my favorite podcast. I've always been fascinated with science, especially astronomy. I learn something new from practically every episode. Thanks for the work y' all do. Thank you, Eli. And thanks to you listening for taking a sec to also leave us a review and share us with your friends. All right, onto the show. You're listening to Short Wave.

[Hannah Chin]

Wave Wave. Wave.

[Podcast Listener/Chorus]

Wave.

[Hannah Chin]

Wave.

[Podcast Listener/Chorus]

Wave. Wave.

[Hannah Chin]

Wave Wave.

[Regina Barber]

From Emphasis pr. Hey, shortwavers. Regina Barber here, joined by producer Hannah Chin. Hey, Hannah.

[Hannah Chin]

Hey, Gina. Okay, so I have a confession to make.

[Regina Barber]

Okay.

[Hannah Chin]

I used to be a huge scaredy cat.

[Regina Barber]

Okay?

[Hannah Chin]

I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of big dogs. I was afraid of scary movies. You name it, I was afraid of it.

[Regina Barber]

Han, I am still that way. But I think anyone who knows you knows that that's not true for you anymore. Like, what happened to help you with your fears?

[Hannah Chin]

So, partially it was growing up. And honestly, partly it was this one job that I worked right after college at a haunted house.

[Regina Barber]

I would not have done that.

[Hannah Chin]

It was so much fun. Like, possibly the most fun job I will ever have. Wow. Sorry. To npr. So much so that I actually dragged a group of my friends all the way to Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to go visit the same haunted house. I don't like Garfield when it's not.

[Podcast Listener/Chorus]

So.

[Hannah Chin]

This place is a historic site. It's called Eastern State Penitentiary. It's, like, in northeast Philadelphia. And it used to be this massive prison. It stopped operating in the 70s, officially, and now it's a museum. During the day, it's a museum about the history of the criminal justice system. And then at night, it's a haunted house. Careful now. Here.

[Regina Barber]

Fancy. It sounds terrifying, but I guess that's the point.

[Hannah Chin]

No, totally. But, Gina, for what it's worth, I'm not the only one who loves haunted houses. Do you know who also loves them?

[Regina Barber]

Who?

[Hannah Chin]

Scientists.

[Regina Barber]

Okay.

[Hannah Chin]

Because they're a really ideal place to study fear.

[Sarah Tasjan]

Typically, when we study things in the lab, we're exposing people to these repeated sort of low intensity experiences. And that's not really the way we experience threat in the real world. So haunted houses have a benefit in that there are these really immersive experiences that have all of these sensations going on at the same time.

[Hannah Chin]

So this is Sarah Tasjan. She's a neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and she studies threat perception in the brain and the body. Basically, she wants to know how humans respond to fear.

[Sarah Tasjan]

What's great about the haunted house experience is that it's still ethically acceptable because people are consenting to go. So rather than us exposing somebody to something that might actually cause them long term harm, we get this really unique opportunity to study these sort of real threats in the real world, but without torturing people outside of their permission.

[Hannah Chin]

And what she's saying is kind of what all of the other scientists that I talked to told me as well, that haunted houses are this really unique environment where we can observe how humans respond to fear in the real world.

[Regina Barber]

So today on the show the Science.

[Hannah Chin]

Of Scaring, we're covering why people want to be scared in the first place, how social dynamics can affect how people perceive that scare, and what all this tells us about ourselves and others.

[Regina Barber]

Happy early Halloween. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from npr.

[Podcast Listener/Chorus]

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[Regina Barber]

Okay, Han, so this time of year, I imagine there's a lot of our, like Halloween loving listeners and they're, they're planning their costumes, they're buying candy, watching movies. In my case, you know, Nightmare before Christmas, that's when this season starts. The spirit of the season, though, is thrills, right?

[Hannah Chin]

Totally. And this combination of fear and fun, scientists say it's a little bit counterintuitive.

[Mark Mamdorf Anderson]

If you look at almost any textbook for first semester psychology students, it will tell you that fear is an evolved emotion that is designed to keep us away from stimuli that might harm us in some way. But then when you look at the world, humans spend so much money, resources, and time pursuing precisely feeling this emotion. And it's clear that the knowledge we have about fear is not the full story.

[Hannah Chin]

So this is Mark Mamdorf Anderson. He's a cognitive behavioral scientist, and he's also the co director of the Recreational Fear Lab in Aarhus, Denmark. And Mark and his colleagues want to understand more about why we pursue fear. So a few years back, they studied visitors at this haunted attraction in Denmark called Dystopia. Mark told me it's set in this old factory in the middle of the woods.

[Regina Barber]

Oh, my gosh, no.

[Hannah Chin]

And the researchers put heart monitors on the visitors. They observed as they went through the attraction. And then at the end, they asked them about their experience, like, how fun was it, how excited were you, Et cetera.

[Regina Barber]

So what did they learn?

[Hannah Chin]

Well, when they looked at all of the data, they found something that they called the inverted U curve or this sweet spot of fear and enjoyment.

[Mark Mamdorf Anderson]

So imagine like a rainbow, shape of a graph or a figure where low amounts of fear resulted in low amount of enjoyment, but so did very high amounts of fear that also resulted in a low amount of enjoyment. On the top of the rainbow, so to say, was where you find the highest level of enjoyment.

[Regina Barber]

Okay, so this is like a Goldilocks, like, region of enjoying fear. Like, not. Not too tame, not too scary, like, just Right.

[Hannah Chin]

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And just to be clear, where this sweet spot is differs for everyone.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah.

[Hannah Chin]

Plus, each person's individual sweet spot can change with time. Mark told me when he's explaining it to people, he often uses the analogy of chili peppers.

[Mark Mamdorf Anderson]

Some people can only eat jalapenos, and everything above that is too strong. But as soon as you eat more and more and more chili pepper, you sort of get accustomed. So, on one hand, consuming horror might also push your individual sweet spot.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah, I mean, I like spicy food a lot, but my spice tolerance is actually lower than my kids. Like, we're both working on it.

[Hannah Chin]

Hey, we're all on our own journey. One interesting thing that Mark mentioned is that younger people overall report much higher and more intense types of fear than older people in response to threat stimuli. So there's a pretty linear relationship where the older you are, the higher your scare threshold tends to be.

[Regina Barber]

How do haunted house creators cater to that? Like Individual sweet spot, mostly by thinking.

[Hannah Chin]

About what makes a good or bad scare. I mean, that's what Margie Kerr does all day.

[Margie Kerr]

I think a lot about how our body responds to different sensory experiences and ways to balance different types of scares.

[Hannah Chin]

Markie is a sociologist and an author who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, and she's also a professional consultant on haunted houses.

[Regina Barber]

So she gets paid to work on haunted houses?

[Greg Siegel]

Yeah.

[Hannah Chin]

Wow.

[Margie Kerr]

Different sounds, different lights, different smells, different sensory experiences that keep you in the moment and also a little bit off balance. You know, really kind of building that sense of. Of good stress and anxiety and anticipation to. To find out what's going to happen next.

[Hannah Chin]

And Gina, if you listen, the words that she's using, like stress or anxiety or anticipation, honestly, even excitement or suspense, these are all different words that we use to describe what is often kind of the same feeling physiologically. Right. When your heart beats faster and your palms start to sweat and you feel like you have butterflies in your stomach.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, even for people like me who, like, don't regularly go to haunted houses or watch horror movies, that feeling can happen. Right. Like during a speech, job interview, or God forbid, like jumping out of a plane, though. I know, like, many people like this for some reason.

[Hannah Chin]

Yeah. So this kind of thing is called an arousal response. And one of Margie's co researchers, he's a neuroscientist and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. His name's Greg Siegel. And he said this arousal response is really key to the whole scare experience.

[Greg Siegel]

Arousal that is not being calm. It doesn't matter whether it's positive or negative. It's the same brain structures that come online to say, gosh, this is important, this is salient, this is maybe threatening or maybe very rewarding, so we can make decisions about what to do with it.

[Hannah Chin]

And every time that we get scared or excited, we're kind of exercising this arousal muscle.

[Regina Barber]

And then it's like, what do you do with that?

[Hannah Chin]

Exactly. And Greg says it's less like a spectrum where we have negative emotions on one side and then positive emotions on the other. He described our feelings as more of a globe where low arousal is at the bottom and high arousal is at the top.

[Greg Siegel]

And everything meets up at the North Pole, which is why we laugh at funerals and we have cute aggression. It's so cute, I just want to squeeze it. And you wouldn't have explanations for why all of these things are so together and indistinguishable and compelling unless they're very similar at those high levels of reactivity.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah. I don't think this is how the average person really thinks about emotion.

[Hannah Chin]

Yeah, totally. I mean, this is definitely not how I think about my emotions. But Markie says this model could help us understand why people seek thrills.

[Margie Kerr]

It's a lot like team sports. You know, you've come together, you've won, you have worked really hard, and your body feels that work because it was, you know, brought up to that high level of arousal, and then you can relax, and then you have that satisfaction of, you know, feeling like you. You have really overcome something very scary, very challenging.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah, I like that you brought up this idea of shared experience, because I feel like so far, our conversation has been, like, based mostly on individual people and how they perceive fear and fun. But for me, so much of if it's fun and I'm not so scared depends on, like, the other people I'm with.

[Hannah Chin]

That's true for me too. And, Gina, I think that's really important because there's scientific evidence to show that your experience with fear is very much affected by the people that you're with.

[Regina Barber]

Really?

[Hannah Chin]

Yes. So both Mark and Sarah, who's the neuroscientist you heard from at the very beginning of the episode, they've independently studied the ways that social dynamics influence people's experience at haunted houses.

[Regina Barber]

Okay.

[Hannah Chin]

And both of their studies found that going through with a friend or even a group of friends has this really big impact. So in Mark's research, he and his colleagues found that people's heart rates synced up when they were experiencing something they found scary with their friends. Right. And overall, those people said they found the experience more scary than if they'd gone by themselves or with strangers. And in Sarah's research, which was based in a haunted house in California called 17th Door, she also found that the more friends you had in your group, the higher your arousal response, which is kind of surprising. Right, because it's the opposite of what other animals experience. There's something called risk dilution, where having more friends equals less risk because animals.

[Sarah Tasjan]

Think that someone else is going to.

[Hannah Chin]

Get eaten, but instead, our friends are mirroring our emotions.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah. I mean, this makes sense. Like, when you see people happy, it makes you happy. And when I see people cry, I cry.

[Hannah Chin]

Exactly. And Mark said this too.

[Mark Mamdorf Anderson]

There's also studies conducted on this where, you know, people have to eat a piece of chocolate, and if they. But if they're eating it with someone else who also thinks it's a really nice piece of Chocolate, then the chocolate seems to taste better. So we have observed these social enhancing effects in other studies as well, and that might be what we are observing here as well.

[Regina Barber]

This is fascinating, but it still doesn't tell me why people like you like getting scared for fun. And I don't.

[Hannah Chin]

Yeah, and that's the fun part, Right. Scientists still don't exactly know, and. But they have a lot of theories. Like, Greg seems to lean towards the idea that humans pursue fear because they're pursuing the sense of arousal and maybe the calm that's released after that arousal. He told me experiencing something scary in a haunted house can kind of reset your baseline and make other things in the real world feel more manageable.

[Regina Barber]

Okay, so this is like putting things into perspective. Okay. Like getting an email from your boss may be less scary if you're comparing it to, like, getting chased by zombies.

[Hannah Chin]

Exactly. Whereas Mark leans towards thinking of it as a learning experience, like this kind of training ground for new situations.

[Mark Mamdorf Anderson]

You are being exposed to an unpredictable situation that's kind of like the hallmark of what horror does. But then all that unpredictability is turned into predictability. In other words, you learn.

[Hannah Chin]

And Margie Kerr, the sociologist, says, honestly, it could be all of the above.

[Margie Kerr]

Fear is not this one thing.

[Hannah Chin]

It's, you know, who we're with, what.

[Margie Kerr]

We'Re doing, what time of year, all of that comes into play. And so sometimes fun is scary. Sometimes positive can even feel sad. You know, it's really so dependent on context.

[Hannah Chin]

Aw.

[Regina Barber]

I do like that our experience of everything is really dependent on context. Han, thank you so much for bringing us the story.

[Hannah Chin]

Thanks so much for having me, Gina.

[Regina Barber]

This episode was Produced by Burleigh McCoy and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our vice president of podcasting. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from npr.

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[Regina Barber]

Other historians have compared it to the.

[Sarah Tasjan]

Apollo missions of going to the moon.

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Listen to Throughline in the NPR app.

[Hannah Chin]

Or wherever you get your podcasts.