Frightfully Intriguing: Exploring Relationships Between Fear and Morbid Curiosity
Voiceover
Presenter(s)
Renne Cabacungan
Abstract or Description
Fear and curiosity are two basic driving forces behind human behavior. These two concepts may combine to create the blended concept of morbid curiosity, a relatively new construct in psychological research. Despite the growing research into people’s morbid interests, there has not been an investigation exploring the relationship between morbid curiosity and what people are afraid of. The current study assesses the relationship between people’s specific fears and their morbid curiosities using two scales. The first scale consists of scenarios describing different kinds of situations commonly perceived as fearful, asking participants to self-report how frightening they perceived each scenarios to be. Fears were chosen from the following five broad categories: death, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego death. The second scale asks participants to self-report their agreement with statements regarding morbid fascinations. The results may lead to insights about what people fear the most and whether relations between certain types of fears and morbid curiosity exist in the general population.
Comments
Dori Shearer4 years ago
Your poster is really interesting! I had never thought about how many people are morbidly curious and that curiosity has been ranked as a hierarchy. Your poster also flows very well and is incredibly easy to read! Great job!
•
Robert Shurina4 years ago
Good job on an interesting topic. I'm morbidly curious to find out why the only significant difference among the categories was in the loss of autonomy. I would have predicted that death, mutilation or ego death would be significantly different from separation anxiety. I'd be interested in hearing any speculation that you may have on this matter.
• • 1 comment
Renne Cabacungan4 years ago
Part of the problem with fear research is that there are many conflicting frameworks for conceptualizing it. In fact, my advisor and I were initially skeptical about the five broad categories put forth in the framework I chose. Additionally, many questions had potential overlap across categories. For example, fear of being kidnapped was grouped with separation, but somebody may be afraid of kidnapping because they associate torture with kidnapping (a fear which would be more related to mutilation). It is difficult to properly assess differences between fear categories because there is no universally applied fear assessment/questionnaire (I made all these scenarios myself). The morbid curiosity scale; however, was taken directly from previous research and has been empirically validated. Part of the question of the research was whether or not this framework was a valid conceptualization of different fears, the answer which is inconclusive (whether because of the specific questions I asked or because of a fundamental issue with the framework itself). <br /><br />I think death and mutilation are basic, primal fears innate in our biology, but fears related to these concepts oftentimes subside overtime. For example, research with children has shown that animals and injury are a top fear in childhood, but these fears are later replaced with social and abstract fears in adolescence. I think loss of autonomy speaks to the core of our being, everybody wants to have control of their lives in one form or another. Although not technically part of the research, I had asked some of my friends what they thought of the questions after they finished it, and most of them found the loss of autonomy questions to be the scariest because they could imagine the outcomes and all their consequences. Losing control of one’s life is existing in a state of both death and life; your own ability to decide your actions is impaired, thus leaving the outcome of your life entirely beyond your control while remaining alive, which in some ways may be scarier than death itself. <br />