Morbid curiosity scale

Key points • Like other animals, humans have evolved strategies for avoiding predators. These apply to predatory people as well. • Many animals, including humans, take advantage of safe opportunities to learn about predators' behaviors and motivational states. • Thanks to our ability to imagine and mentally simulate events, humans have many opportunities to learn about serial killers in a safe setting. Our fascination with serial killers is part of a broader tendency that humans have to be intrigued by dangerous situations. I’ve been conducting research on a phenomenon I call morbid curiosity, which refers to the tendency to seek out information about dangerous circumstances. As part of this research, I’ve developed the Morbid Curiosity Test, which measures how morbidly curious an individual is and the types of things they are morbidly curious about. I’ve found that morbid curiosity tends to fall into four domains: To better understand our fascination with serial killers, we first need to understand our evolutionary relationship with predators. Effectively avoiding a predator is an essential skill for most animals. However, predators aren’t always looking for a meal. If a predator isn’t hungry, it’s not in the predator’s best interest to chase after prey. Hunting is energetically costly, it isn’t always successful, and food can’t be safely and easily stored after it’s caught. Prey often live in close proximity to their predators. But, because the predators aren’t always hu...

This is an Open Access article from ESIC Vol. 5.1 . An Infectious Curiosity: Morbid Curiosity and Media Preferences During a Pandemic Coltan Scrivner Abstract In this study conducted during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, I explored how trait morbid curiosity was related to interest in 1) factual information about Coronavirus that was specifically morbid, 2) general factual information about Coronavirus, 3) pandemic and virus genres of films and TV shows, and 4) genres of film and TV shows that center around threat more broadly. Participants (n = 125) who scored high in morbid curiosity reported increased interest, compared to usual, in pandemic/virus genres as well as horror and thriller genres. Morbidly curious participants were also more interested specifically in morbid information about Coronavirus. Furthermore, disgust sensitivity was unrelated to these preferences. These results provide initial evidence that trait morbid curiosity can predict particular media preferences in the face of a real threat, and that morbid curiosity may reflect an adaptive predisposition in some individuals toward learning about the dangerous and disgusting aspects of a threat. Keywords: Pandemic, Morbid Curiosity, Disgust, Threat, Horror Introduction Just three months into the 2020 Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, Contagion, a 2011 movie about a deadly viral pandemic, rose from the 270th most-watched Warner Bros. to the second most-watched Warner Bros. film (Mack 2020). Google Trends shows...

Study data published in Personality and Individual Differences suggest that psychological resilience during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic may be related to engagement with thematically relevant media. In an online survey conducted in early 2020, participants who described an interest in horror movies or pandemic-related fiction displayed more psychological resilience to the COVID-19 pandemic. Trait morbid curiosity was also associated with greater resilience and preparedness. The investigators recruited US residents to complete a survey on Prolific, an academic research website. Participants were surveyed during the month of April (2020). The survey asked participants to rate their interest in various film genres, including horror, apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic, zombie, and alien invasion. The survey also asked participants to rate their interest in pandemic films. Psychological resilience was captured using a 13-item scale developed by authors, termed the Pandemic Psychological Resilience Scale (PPRS). Participants were instructed to rate how much they agreed or disagreed with each item on a 7-point Likert scale. Trait Morbid Curiosity was measured using the Morbid Curiosity Scale, a 24-item assessment developed in 2020. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted to identify relationships between psychological resilience, self-reported COVID-19 preparedness, and interest in certain media genres. The study cohort comprised 310 individuals. Self-reported inte...

People often seek out stories, videos or images that detail death, violence or harm. Considering the ubiquity of this behavior, it is surprising that we know very little about the neural circuits involved in choosing negative information. Using fMRI, the present study shows that choosing intensely negative stimuli engages similar brain regions as those that support extrinsic incentives and “regular” curiosity. Participants made choices to view negative and positive images, based on negative (e.g., a soldier kicks a civilian against his head) and positive (e.g., children throw flower petals at a wedding) verbal cues. We hypothesized that the conflicting, but relatively informative act of choosing to view a negative image, resulted in stronger activation of reward circuitry as opposed to the relatively uncomplicated act of choosing to view a positive stimulus. Indeed, as preregistered, we found that choosing negative cues was associated with activation of the striatum, inferior frontal gyrus, anterior insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, both when contrasting against a passive viewing condition, and when contrasting against positive cues. These findings nuance models of decision-making, valuation and curiosity, and are an important starting point when considering the value of seeking out negative content. Humans are active agents who often deliberately expose themselves to “morbid” information (e.g., information involving death, violence or harm). People choose to watch gr...

Curiosity is a fundamental human motivation that influences learning, the acquisition of knowledge, and life fulfillment. Our ability to understand the benefits (and costs) of being a curious person hinges on adequate assessment. Synthesizing decades of prior research, our goal was to improve a well-validated, multi-dimensional measure of curiosity (Kashdan et al., 2018). First, we sought to distinguish between two types of social curiosity: the overt desire to learn from other people versus covert, surreptitious interest in what other people say and do. Second, we sought to remove weaker items and reduce the length of each subscale. Using data from a survey of 483 working adults (Study 1) and 460 community adults (Study 2), we found evidence to support the pre-existing four dimensions of curiosity (Joyous Exploration, Deprivation Sensitivity, Stress Tolerance, and Thrill Seeking) along with the separation of the fifth dimension into Overt Social Curiosity and Covert Social Curiosity. Each factor of the Five-Dimensional Curiosity Scale Revised (5DCR) had substantive relations with a battery of personality (e.g., Big Five, intellectual humility) and well-being (e.g., psychological need satisfaction) measures. With greater bandwidth and predictive power, the 5DCR offers new opportunities for basic research and the evaluation of curiosity enhancing interventions. Introduction In a world where people are deluged with information and can attain novel experiences with only a few...

This paper examined, with a behavioral paradigm, to what extent people choose to view stimuli that portray death, violence or harm. Based on briefly presented visual cues, participants made choices between highly arousing, negative images and positive or negative alternatives. The negative images displayed social scenes that involved death, violence or harm (e.g., war scene), or decontextualized, close-ups of physical harm (e.g., mutilated face) or natural threat (e.g., attacking shark). The results demonstrated that social negative images were chosen significantly more often than other negative categories. Furthermore, participants preferred social negative images over neutral images. Physical harm images and natural threat images were not preferred over neutral images, but were chosen in about thirty-five percent of the trials. These results were replicated across three different studies, including a study that presented verbal descriptions of images as pre-choice cues. Together, these results show that people deliberately subject themselves to negative images. With this, the present paper demonstrates a dynamic relationship between negative information and behavior and advances new insights into the phenomenon of morbid curiosity. Citation: Oosterwijk S (2017) Choosing the negative: A behavioral demonstration of morbid curiosity. PLoS ONE 12(7): e0178399. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178399 Editor: Andreas B. Eder, University of Würzburg, GERMANY Received: July...

We know we will eventually die As far as we know, humans are the only animals capable of understanding their own mortality. We know we will die one day, and we understand what this means. Interestingly, being aware of our mortality could influence how we behave. One influential theory about how awareness of death influences behavior is Terror Management Theory. According to this theory, certain cultural and psychological adaptations exist to alleviate the inevitable terror that arises due to awareness of our own mortality. For example, Terror Management Theory argues that humans need 1 Another premise of the theory is that people find solace from this anxiety in the knowledge that they belong to a community and the feeling of security that arises from this. Along these lines, Terror Management Theory predicts that people will defend their worldview and uphold their cultural values when faced with thoughts of their own death. Curiosity and the terror of death Terror Management Theory has amassed hundreds of publications over the past three decades. Many of these studies looked at important moderators of the self-esteem and worldview defense findings. However, one potential moderator is curiously absent from the literature. In my search of the literature, I couldn't find many studies on how curiosity relates to mortality salience responses. One study on curiosity was mentioned in a recent Terror Management Theory review paper, however, the paper that was mentioned remains un...