The informant was XXXXXX, but I’ll call him A. According to my notes, he was a twenty-two-year-old college student. F, a freelancer, introduced me to him.
I interviewed him on March 4, 2012.
A was studying psychology at a university in Tokyo. The Tohoku earthquake had just happened the year before, which made finding a job very difficult for him. Still, he’d managed to land something that started in April and he’d already submitted his graduation thesis, so he was relieved and excited for the future.
The story was about his thesis.
The title of his research was “Body Language When Displaying Fear and Similar Emotions to Others.”
In the study, he showed people a short, scary video and then noted what physical gestures test subjects made when they related their experience to another person.
The study was quite unique. Apparently, A was a big horror fan and thought he’d have more fun doing a research project involving something he liked.
He wasn’t just interested in what gestures were most common, though. He also wanted to study how his test subjects’ personalities influenced the results. So A separated the subjects into groups.
To do this, he gave them a survey with ten or so questions that covered a wide range of descriptors, like “I like horror / I don’t like horror,” “I like talking / I don’t like talking,” or “I have siblings / I don’t have siblings.” A took the responses and body language data from about fifty subjects, and he tried to determine if any of the opposing groups showed a significant difference.
Because his study focused on body language when conveying fear, A wanted to avoid showing the participants a movie where the fear came from the story itself. He wanted something abstract that would give the person watching it a pure sense of terror. In the end, he chose a “cursed video” submitted to an online video-hosting site.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the movie The Ring. In that film, anyone who watches a certain cursed video is supposed to die seven days later. The eerie but completely nonsensical cursed video featured in the movie became a social phenomenon. As you probably remember, video-hosting sites were flooded with self-made “cursed videos” in the wake of the movie’s popularity.
The video A chose didn’t really stand out in any way. It ran for about three minutes, changing images every few seconds. The pictures were of stereotypical stuff like blood-covered knives, a pixelated human figure in an abandoned building, or a woman with a frightening face.
When A saw the video, he recognized some of the images as scenes from famous horror movies. In other words, it was a low-quality amateur creation made by splicing together scary clips. The video? I tried to find it for our interview today, but I guess it’s already been deleted. I couldn’t manage to track it down.
A showed the video to his subjects, then he asked them to describe their feelings after watching it. He received a variety of answers. One person hugged themselves and said they were scared, while another said it reminded them of a nightmare they used to have. However, because of the topic he’d chosen, A had a hard time finding fifty people for his study.
To sidetrack for just a second, it’s a pretty interesting experiment, right? When I was interviewing him, I got so sucked in that I totally forgot I was there reporting on a scary story. The results? Yeah, of course I asked him about that.
He categorized each body movement by “type,” “frequency,” and “duration.” Most of the questions didn’t result in any significant differences, but he saw a clear distinction between people who liked horror and those who didn’t.
Specifically, those who liked horror would spend more time imitating the movement and appearance of ghosts than those who didn’t. You know, they would hold their hands out in front of them and moan. Things like that.
In contrast, people who disliked horror would use filler gestures more frequently and for longer durations. By filler gestures, he meant meaningless actions like moving your hands while talking. You know, like the filler words people insert in sentences.
A analyzed this tendency so he could include it in his thesis.
He found that people who like horror still feel scared, but they enjoy that experience and want others to feel the same fear and joy. So they re-create details to convey the essence of the ghost or other scary experience in an effort to entertain the listener by scaring them.
People who dislike horror, however, view being scared as an unpleasant experience and want their listener to feel empathy and compassion for them. Their emotions tend to outpace their speech, resulting in more frequent filler gestures.
I found the whole thing so illuminating. Yeah, I was fascinated. In a way, it reminded me of the relationship between the publishers of paranormal magazines and their readers.
We provide our readers with the paranormal content they crave, doing everything we can to make it entertaining. But some of those readers experience strong reactions to certain information. They’re the people who get worked up enough to contact the editor. You brought it up earlier. Yeah, I’m talking about the letters from the readers.
We received a lot more for the issues that talked about . Not stuff like “I saw a UFO,” but things like “I’m scared, and I need help.”
Oops, I got really off topic there. Sorry, I’ve always been a blabbermouth.
Anyway, during his research, A analyzed the gestures of fifty people. All by hand, all by himself. I was surprised he’d taken such an analog approach.
First, he recorded his subjects describing their experience to someone else. Then he reviewed the tapes and noted in an Excel spreadsheet all the gestures each subject made, including the type, frequency, and duration of each gesture and the subject’s profile. Finally, he tallied the results. The scary video was only three minutes long, but his subjects talked for about five minutes. Some even kept going for over ten minutes. It took A quite a lot of time and effort.