Haunted-house experience scares up interesting insights on the body’s reaction to threats

The so-called fight-or-flight response is evolution's way of preparing the body to defend itself or flee from a real or perceived threat, like a lion in the tall grass or -- in modern times -- an overdue performance review.

Scientists have struggled to study the effects of genuine threats on people's mental and physical state because of ethical and practical constraints of human lab experiments.

In new research published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers used a haunted-house experience to study participants' subjective and physiological responses to perceived threats in a safe yet immersive environment.

In this haunted-house setting, which included 17 rooms with various threats that formed an uninterrupted experience, the researchers examined how the body responds to threats differently depending on the social context (whether friends were around), features of the threats (whether they were expected), and emotions (whether individuals felt afraid).

"There are a lot of factors that influence how human bodies respond to threat," said Sarah M. Tashjian, of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and lead author of the study. "We found that friend-related emotional contagion, threat predictability, and subjective feelings of fear were all relevant for the body mounting a response."

All of these factors help increase a person's ability to survive when under threat, but in the study, each had slightly different influences, which demonstrate the dynamic nature of the sympathetic nervous system.

To study the effects of frightening experiences, previous studies used scary images, mild electric shocks, or loud noises. In the current study, 156 participants went through the haunted house in small groups. During the 30-minute experience, they encountered situations that mimicked the threat of suffocation, an oncoming speeding car, and a volley of shots (with pellets) from a firing squad.

Participants wore real-time physiological-monitoring wristbands to measure their electrodermal activity, or sweat-induced changes in the skin's electrical characteristics, including skin conductance level and skin conductance response.

Before visiting the haunted house, participants rated their expected fear on a scale from 1 to 10. Afterward, they rated their experienced fear level on the same scale. From these data, four factors were examined, including group composition, threat imminence, intrapersonal factors of fear, and a "baseline orienting response," or the participant's sensitivity to threats.

Results showed a positive association between the number of friends in a group and tonic arousal, which reflects the body's overall physical response to stress or emotion. On average, the more friends that participants had with them while touring the haunted house, the higher their physical response.

"We interpreted this to reflect fear contagion -- if your friends are around, your body picks up on their signals and has a higher level of arousal even in the absence of specific scares or startles," Tashjian said. "In the lab, it is difficult to study the effects of groups on physiology."

Studies usually involve testing one person at a time or, at most, pairs of friends. In this study, the researchers had the unique opportunity to study how being in groups with different mixes of friends and strangers affected people's perceptions of threat.

The researchers also noted positive associations between unexpected attacks, subjective fear, and phasic frequency. Phasic effects are rapid changes the body experiences as it responds to an event. Individuals who felt the most afraid during the haunted house had more peaks in these responses. "If your body is more cued-in to the threatening event, you also psychologically feel more fear," Tashjian said.

Other findings revealed that participants with an initially strong response to the first room of the haunted house showed increased responses as they visited other rooms. Participants with more frequent responses in the first room showed decreased responses over time.

"From a results perspective, this study is distinct because we measure multiple aspects of skin conductance, including slow responding, rapid responding, frequency of responses, and level of responses," Tashjian explained. "Most studies use just one of these measures, which limits our understanding of how dynamic the sympathetic nervous system is and how different factors exert different influences on biology."

She added that the research is a "major advance for cognitive and social psychology," because it furthers the understanding of how "naturalistic contexts," such as the immersive haunted house experience, influence the body's response to threats. Also significant is the finding that friends amplify the physical response.

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Pupils can learn more effectively through stories than activities

 Storytelling -- the oldest form of teaching -- is the most effective way of teaching primary school children about evolution, say researchers at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath.

A randomised controlled trial found that children learn about evolution more effectively when engaged through stories read by the teacher, than through doing tasks to demonstrate the same concept.

The scientists investigated several different methods of teaching evolution in primary schools, to test whether a pupil-centred approach (where pupils took part in an activity) or a teacher-centred approach (where pupils were read a story by the teacher), led to a greater improvement in understanding of the topic.

They also looked at whether using human-based examples of evolution (comparing arm bones in humans with those in animals), or more abstract examples that were harder to emotionally engage with (comparing the patterns of trilobites), produced better results in terms of the children's understanding of evolution.

Whilst all the methods improved the pupils' understanding of evolution, the study, published in the journal Science of Learning, found that the story-based approach combined with the abstract examples of evolution were the most effective lessons.

This goes against educational orthodoxy that states that a pupil-centred approach to learning, using human-based examples with which children can easily identify, should yield the best results.

The study recruited 2500 primary school students who were tested for understanding of evolutionary concepts before and after the lessons.

Professor Laurence Hurst, Director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, led the study.

He said: "We were really surprised by the results -- we expected that pupils would be more engaged with an activity rather than listening to a story, and that children would identify more strongly with the human-based examples of evolution than the somewhat abstract example of trilobites, but in fact the opposite was true.

"This is the first large randomised controlled trial that is evaluating the effectiveness of different methods of teaching, using similar scientific methods to those used in drug interaction trials to test whether a new treatment works.

"Our results show that we should be careful about our preconceptions of what works best.

"We only tested the teaching of evolution in this way -- it would be interesting to see if these findings also applied to other subjects of the curriculum."

Professor Momna Hejmadi, Associate Dean of the University's Faculty of Science, helped to design the study and co-authored the paper. She said: "Evolution was introduced to the national curriculum for primary schools in 2014.

"It's a really important subject as it forms the foundation for many parts of biology. However, many primary school teachers, if they don't have a science background, are less confident about teaching it.

"At the Milner Centre for Evolution, we've developed a range of free lesson plans using really cheap teaching materials, as well as a free online course for teachers to help them engage their pupils with this important subject.

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