Dr. Howard Smith Oncall

  Vidcast:  https://youtu.be/OmBtKu6rAc4   More than 70% of us watch at least one horror movie every 6 months and we love exercising our brain’s fight or flight centers as well as its emotional regions.  This from a Finnish analysis of some 216 subjects watching a collection of the 100 highest-rated horror movies.   The overwhelming sensation triggered was excitement followed by fright, anxiety, nervousness, and disgust. Nearly 35% derived pleasure!  The movies that evoked the strongest responses depicted psychological horror followed by real disaster, supernatural phenomena, menacing criminals, torture, and gore.   MRI analysis of the viewer showed that slowly escalating threats trigger sensory centers, visual and auditory.  Sudden horror triggers executive evaluation and rapid decision-making.   Matthew Hudson, Kerttu Seppälä, Vesa Putkinen, Lihua Sun, Enrico Glerean, Tomi Karjalainen, Henry K. Karlsson, Jussi Hirvonen, Lauri Nummenmaa. Dissociable neural systems for unconditioned acute and sustained fear.