Haunted House Science: You Don’t Need Gore To Terrify, If You Know The Brain

Wbur:

It’s a classic Halloween activity: the homemade haunted house, replete with cold spaghetti “worms” and bowls of peeled-grape “eyeballs.” Remember?

That old tradition gets a 21st-century scientific twist at an elaborate haunted house in Newton that opens for just one night a year — the night before Halloween — to raise money for charity. And it is elaborate not just in its multitudes of living ghouls, its gaggles of graves and squads of skeletons.

It is an exercise in scare tactics informed by brain science.

“You can be really artful about how you scare people without a lot of gore,” says Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett. “And I thought, well, who better to do that than a lab that studies the science of emotion? We can use research to predict what the effects will be, to make it super-scary without a lot of blood and guts.”

Barrett leads the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Lab at Northeastern and Massachusetts General Hospital. For the last 10 Halloweens, she and her family have created a haunted basement in their Victorian home, helped by her lab colleagues — grad students, post-docs and other researchers who play monsters for the night.

Read the whole story: Wbur