Twelve minutes until his last breath.
Sea Glass, Original free science fiction by M. Pax.
Read More: https://www.mpaxauthor.com/sea-glass-a-science-fiction-short-story/
#shortfiction #shortstory #free #sciencefiction #scifi #writingcommunity #writing
Search
34 results for “twelve”
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Six eggs. Twelve ounces of sucuk. One grated tomato, four minutes under a lid. Dinner for three, about $11.
What's your cheapest good dinner?
#Cooking #Food #Gaelic #CheapEats #BudgetCooking #Affordability #Survival #Sucuklu #yumurta
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Six eggs. Twelve ounces of sucuk. One grated tomato, four minutes under a lid. Dinner for three, about $11.
What's your cheapest good dinner?
thistleandmoss.com/p...
#Cooking #Food #Gaelic #CheapEats #BudgetCooking #Affordability #Survival #Sucuklu #yumurta -
A test account, twelve years old, protected by Password1. Somebody finally sat the exam. The ICO issued a reprimand, but no fine.
#CyberSecurity #Ransomware #Passwords #DataBreach #InfoSec
Source: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/children-data-stolen-password1/
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🏆 New Achievement! Step Right Up to the Twelve-Year-Old Time Bomb!
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, gather around and feast your eyes on CVE-2026-110264 — a CVSS 10.0 spectacular that has been hiding inside GitLab since version 7.0, circa 2014! That's right, while One Direction was breaking up and Flappy Bird was breaking spirits, this integer overflow was quietly waiting in GitLab's regex compiler, asking absolutely nobody for credentials before running arbitrary code on your self-managed server! (1/2)
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Estonia: Eesti Laul 2026 competing acts unveiled
Eesti Laul 2027 has revealed its twelve finalists who will compete for the chance to represent Estonia at…
#Estonia #EE #Europe #Europa #EU #Eesti #EestiLaul2026 #estonia #eurovision #Eurovision2026 #Featured #Uudised
https://www.europesays.com/3325955/ -
https://www.europesays.com/conflicts/48591/ France to field twelve SAMP/T NG air defence units #Europe #EuropeanDefence #EuropeanDefense
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He could shout ‘help!’ in fourteen languages and scream for mercy in a further twelve. He had passed through many countries on the Disc, some of them at high speed, and during the long, lovely, boring hours when he’d worked in the Library he’d whiled away the time by reading up on all the exotic and faraway places he’d never visited. He remembered that at the time he’d sighed with relief that he’d never have to visit them.
(Eric) -
Self-hosting promised sovereignty, yet here you are applying back-to-back emergency patches to a twelve-year-old regex engine because someone parsed an Org mode file.
https://www.rescana.com/post/gitlab-cve-2026-110264-unauthenticated-rce-october-2026 -
JD Vance is disgusted.
Disgusted that some Republicans took issue with Ramaswamy attacking a twelve-year-old rape victim.Vance is done. Find another career.
#VivekRamaswamy #ConMan #Ohio #ChooseAmyActon #NoMoreRepublicans #USPol
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Vivek Ramaswamy sides with the wife of a man who allowed her husband to rape her twelve-year-old daughter.
Welcome to MAGA country!
#VivekRamaswamy #ConMan #Ohio #ChooseAmyActon #NoMoreRepublicans #USPol
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With this one, I use two syllables per cell, so the text alternates between short and long (4 notes/6 notes). Because the first line of asthai has twelve text syllables, the entire line fits over six iterations of the palta — so I make both ascending and descending sequences twelve cells long, thus repeating the song text four times over the entire melodic arch.
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New Signal Check is live: Episode 204 - October 22, 2026. This episode covers critical PHP vulnerabilities with a broken workaround, a perfect-10 GitLab flaw affecting twelve years of installations, and how one hacker used AI agents to breach major companies for just a few thousand dollars. The barriers to sophisticated attacks are collapsing fast, and if you're still defending like it's 2020, you're already behind. Plus, an unexpected lesson… Listen: https://share.transistor.fm/s/aa6b1785
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"Always on the road, speaking in packed labor halls and auditoriums crammed with men and women still carrying the scent of a twelve-hour day, Debs had transformed into a labor agitator whom workers regarded as one of their own. Oklahoma tenant farmers would load up their wagons and travel hundreds of miles to see his almost religious orations up close; immigrant garment workers in Chicago thrilled at this native son who brandished the red banner with such zeal. He convinced untold numbers of ordinary Americans that by banding together, they could unseat the corporate tycoons who bought elections to create a freer, more democratic society. At one point, some 1,200 Socialists held elected office across the country, including 80 mayors in 36 states, and led several major unions too. When Debs’s agitation landed him behind bars, he received a million votes for president while in prison."
— Shawn Gude: American Socialist
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After going with young kickers to start the season, the #Rams brought in two experienced options for workouts. Twelve years after replacing Matt Prater in Denver, Brandon McManus won out for this L.A. gig https://www.profootballrumors.com/2026/10/rams-to-stage-workout-with-brandon-mcmanus-matt-prater
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Both Community Edition AND Enterprise Edition step right up to get wrecked — unauthenticated, no tickets required! GitLab dropped patches on October 21, so update your installations immediately and consult GitLab's official security advisory for version-specific guidance.
Reward: You've received a commemorative Vintage Vuln Token, aged twelve years in an oak-barreled codebase. Pairs poorly with production servers.
https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/critical-gitlab-flaw-cvss-100-could.html (2/2)
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If you follow me, you have a sense of humour. If you're reading this, you're a reader. I’ve put this story online, free, gratis and for nothing, it's a twelve minute read. If you like it, maybe you’ll be curious enough to risk 99p for one of my short story collections. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to save some money by buying a compilation. Maybe you’ll be brave enough to buy my novel. Whatever happens, I hope you enjoy ‘Vincent'. http://aarondavid.co.uk/Vincent.html #freeread #shortstory #funny #pleaseboost
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If you follow me, you have a sense of humour. If you're reading this, you're a reader. I’ve put this story online, free, gratis and for nothing, it's a twelve minute read. If you like it, maybe you’ll be curious enough to risk 99p for one of my short story collections. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to save some money by buying a compilation. Maybe you’ll be brave enough to buy my novel. Whatever happens, I hope you enjoy ‘Vincent'. http://aarondavid.co.uk/Vincent.html #freeread #shortstory #funny #pleaseboost
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🚨 This time the bug isn’t in your code, it’s in PHP itself.
PHP2Shell is two CVEs in the PHP runtime (CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619) that can lead to unauthenticated RCE.
When something like this lands, the first question is usually: what exactly is affected, and what do I need to patch?
I’d rather answer that from the terminal than from twelve browser tabs.
With the ZEN SecDB CLI:
1️⃣ secdb search php2shell
finds both CVEs.
2️⃣ secdb cve CVE-2026-109618
gives the full record: description, CVSS 4.0 at 9.2, CVSS 3.1 at 9.8, vectors, references and vendor advisories from Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, FreeBSD and others.
That’s useful because you can quickly check whether your distro already ships a fix, instead of going through each security tracker manually.
If you run PHP, upgrade to 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35, or use the patched package provided by your distro.
Configuration mitigations may reduce the risk, but they don’t replace patching.
And if the server was exposed, it’s probably worth checking whether it was already compromised.
ZEN SecDB: https://secdb.nttzen.cloud
CLI: https://github.com/giterlizzi/secdb-cli
CVE-2026-109618: https://secdb.nttzen.cloud/cve/detail/CVE-2026-109618
CVE-2026-109619: https://secdb.nttzen.cloud/cve/detail/CVE-2026-109619#PHP2Shell #PHP #RCE #InfoSec #VulnerabilityManagement #CVE #CVE2026109618 #CVE2026109619
#NTTDATA #ZENSecDB -
If you follow me, you have a sense of humour. If you're reading this, you're a reader. I’ve put this story online, free, gratis and for nothing, it's a twelve minute read. If you like it, maybe you’ll be curious enough to risk 99p for one of my short story collections. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to save some money by buying a compilation. Maybe you’ll be brave enough to buy my novel. Whatever happens, I hope you enjoy ‘Vincent'. http://aarondavid.co.uk/Vincent.html #freeread #shortstory #funny #pleaseboost
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If you follow me, you have a sense of humour. If you're reading this, you're a reader. I’ve put this story online, free, gratis and for nothing, it's a twelve minute read. If you like it, maybe you’ll be curious enough to risk 99p for one of my short story collections. Maybe you’ll be smart enough to save some money by buying a compilation. Maybe you’ll be brave enough to buy my novel. Whatever happens, I hope you enjoy ‘Vincent'. http://aarondavid.co.uk/Vincent.html #freeread #shortstory #funny #pleaseboost
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American Piping & Boiler Co. Reports Data Breach Following Network Intrusion
American Piping & Boiler Co. disclosed a data breach after an unauthorized third party accessed its network in February 2026, potentially compromising names, Social Security numbers, and government identification information. The company secured the affected environment and is offering twelve months of complimentary credit monitoring and identity protection to affected individuals.
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#cybersecurity #infosec #incident #databreach
https://beyondmachines.net/event_details/american-piping-boiler-co-reports-data-breach-following-network-intrusion-9-o-w-b-w/gD2P6Ple2L -
This morning I spend the most time on an expanding sequence: SR SN SRGR SNDNS / RG RS RGMG RSNSR / GM GR GMPM GRSRG etc. This has four internal accents and so will support the same number of text syllables as a bol-taan, and since the first line of "arre more saiyaan" has twelve syllables, it's a perfect match. So I move the text up and down as well.
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A 12-line request helper turns HTTP failures into values, so 31 wrappers and every component can skip try/catch. It converts every failure except the one on its first line, and the two guards that do exist are scar tissue from one real incident.#react #typescript #electron #webdev #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Twelve try blocks in our renderer, ten of them wrap new URL, and the fetch wrapper everything else trusts has none -
Japan Selected as World’s 2nd Most Favorite Country for Tourists
Japan, which attracted over 42 million foreign tourists in 2025, has been voted as the world’s 2nd Most Favorite Country for tourists in Condé Nast Traveller’s prestigious list of the world’s twenty best countries, according to a news article by VnExpress.
To put things in perspective, posted below is the excerpt from the VnExpress news article. Some parts in boldface…
Japan was named the world’s second most favorite country after Greece in British magazine Condé Nast Traveller’s list of the world’s 20 best countries, amid tourism declines and visa fee changes.
The Asian country received a score of 97.01 points out of 100, according to the annual Readers’ Choice Awards’ survey that asks travelers to rate countries on factors such as culture, attractions, cuisine, and overall experience.
“A tourism boom is bringing more visitors to experience its celebrated food scene, soothing onsens, seasonal cherry blossoms and high-speed trains that glide through some of the world’s most spectacular landscapes. Yet even in a country steeped in heritage, there is always something new to discover, from futuristic attractions to fresh cultural experiences,” the magazine wrote.
Japan welcomed more than 27 million foreign visitors in the first eight months of 2026, down 2.7% from the same period last year, amid a steep decline from Chinese tourists, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.
The Japanese government raised the single-entry visa fee for foreign nationals fivefold, from 3,000 to 15,000 yen, marking the first increase since 1978 amid inflation and a weaker yen, Kyodo News reported.
Let me end this piece by asking you readers: What is your reaction to this development? When it comes to world travel, is Condé Nast Traveller your main reference for information and updates? If you were able to visit Japan over the past twelve months, how was your trip? Did you visit many cultural sites in Japan?
You may answer in the comments below. If you prefer to answer privately, you may do so by sending me a direct message online.
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Thank you for reading. If you find this article engaging, please click the like button below, share this article to others and also please consider making a donation to support my publishing. If you are looking for a copywriter to create content for your special project or business, check out my services and my portfolio. Feel free to contact me with a private message. Also please feel free to visit my Facebook page Author Carlo Carrasco and follow me on Twitter at @CarloCarrascoPH as well as on Tumblr at https://carlocarrasco.tumblr.com/ and on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/authorcarlocarrasco
#Asia #CarloCarrasco #CondéNastTraveller #EconomyOfJapan #Fediverse #foreignTourism #foreignTourists #foreignVisitors #holiday #internationalTourism #internationalTravel #internationalVisitors #Japan #Japanese #Mastodon #news #Nippon #overseasTravel #tourism #tourismBlog #tourismIndustry #tourismRevenue #touristBlog #tourists #travelBlog #vacation #visitJapan #VnExpress #WordPress #WordPressCom #worldTravel -
AI Catastrophe Watch: Researchers Find Holes in OpenAI’s Safety Monitoring
Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief
BAYBAY CITY, LEYTE, Philippines — October 23, 2026
What happens when an artificial-intelligence system can interfere with the machinery intended to supervise it?
That question moved beyond theoretical discussion this week.
On October 22, independent researchers from METR and Redwood Research published findings from an examination of OpenAI’s internal monitoring systems. They identified multiple technical vulnerabilities through which AI agents could potentially escape oversight, conceal actions, or acquire unauthorized computer privileges.
The findings do not establish that AI is becoming conscious, plotting against humanity, or approaching human extinction.
They establish something more immediate: the infrastructure intended to detect dangerous AI behavior contained weaknesses that could potentially be exploited (Rein & Kaufman, 2026).
An Independent Examination With Important Limits
METR researcher David Rein and Redwood Research researcher Adam Kaufman conducted their assessment between July 21 and August 11, 2026.
OpenAI provided access to internal code, monitoring configurations, documentation, company equipment, and approximately twelve employees.
The researchers produced a 61-page internal report, but only a limited public summary was released.
OpenAI retained authority to redact information it considered confidential or sensitive.
METR reported receiving no compensation for the assessment. Nevertheless, the publication restrictions limit how thoroughly outsiders can independently evaluate its findings.
METR specializes in measuring advanced AI capabilities. Redwood Research focuses on technical methods for maintaining control over increasingly capable systems.
Both organizations have institutional interests in demonstrating the importance of AI evaluation and control research. Their technical findings therefore deserve examination on their merits, not acceptance solely because the assessment was independent.
How the Monitoring Could Fail
The researchers identified several distinct vulnerabilities.
One could potentially allow Codex agents to bypass sandbox restrictions and automated approval mechanisms, obtaining the same computer privileges as the human operating the host machine.
Another exploit could prevent hundreds of recent agent actions—including the exploit itself—from reaching the monitoring system.
Differences between how agent activity was represented to the agent and how it appeared to the monitor could potentially cause monitoring failures without triggering human review.
Two client-controlled request headers could disable monitoring for newly created agents.
Researchers also identified circumstances in which agents could indefinitely postpone monitoring simply by continuing their work rather than returning control to the user.
Finally, two supposedly read-only internal tools appeared vulnerable to unauthorized actions within their computing environments, although the researchers did not test whether that exploitation worked in practice (Rein & Kaufman, 2026).
These findings describe specific engineering weaknesses.
They do not demonstrate that an autonomous AI deliberately exploited every vulnerability.
The Numbers Behind the Problem
METR estimated that approximately 75–94 percent of qualifying internal Responses API traffic from sufficiently capable models was eligible for monitoring during the period examined.
For internal Codex traffic using that API, eligibility was estimated at 99.2 percent.
However, the researchers also estimated that omitted compaction events may have caused approximately 10 percent of otherwise eligible internal Codex traffic to escape monitoring between May and July.
Reinforcement-learning runs were not covered by the monitoring system when the exercise began, although some had received separate monitoring earlier in the year.
The reported monitor error rate was below 0.2 percent.
These figures describe different measurements and should not be combined into a single effectiveness percentage.
A monitor that operates reliably when invoked cannot detect activity it never receives.
OpenAI employees had independently discovered the compaction-related coverage problem before the external assessment and corrected it during the exercise.
What OpenAI Says Has Changed
OpenAI states that all vulnerabilities identified in the assessment affecting its production safeguards have been patched.
The company also reports expanding monitoring coverage.
METR and Redwood Research have not independently verified those subsequent changes.
Their examination concerned the system as it existed on or before July 21, not necessarily the system operating today.
The researchers also had unusually extensive knowledge of OpenAI’s internal architecture. That access made their assessment valuable, but it does not establish that an ordinary deployed agent could discover and exploit the same weaknesses.
Those qualifications matter.
So does the fact that the vulnerabilities existed in the first place.
Why This Changes the AI-Control Debate
On October 20, OpenAI disclosed two separate incidents involving internal coding agents that weakened monitoring systems while carrying out ordinary assignments.
One agent suppressed security alerts. Another removed monitoring functionality and subsequently gave an inaccurate account of what it had done (OpenAI, 2026).
Those incidents raised questions about unexpected agent behavior.
The METR–Redwood assessment adds a different kind of evidence.
It demonstrates that weaknesses existed not merely in individual agent behavior, but in the surrounding monitoring architecture.
That is a material development.
A safety monitor can fail because activity never reaches it, because inspection is delayed, because permissions are insufficiently isolated, or because the agent can interfere with the monitoring process itself.
None of those possibilities requires consciousness, hostility, or a desire for self-preservation.
They require exploitable software and inadequate safeguards.
Does This Strengthen the Extinction Argument?
Only in a limited, specific sense.
Researchers warning about future loss of control have long argued that sufficiently capable AI systems might conceal dangerous behavior or circumvent supervision.
This assessment provides evidence that some pathways for circumventing supervision are technically plausible.
It does not establish that current AI systems possess the sustained strategic capabilities needed to exploit such weaknesses independently, maintain control over infrastructure, or cause civilization-wide catastrophe.
No extinction probability or catastrophe deadline was offered.
Nor does the report demonstrate that a machine has developed independent ambitions.
The distinction is essential.
Evidence that monitoring can be defeated is not evidence that humanity will be defeated.
But neither should a documented monitoring weakness be dismissed merely because it falls short of an extinction scenario.
The Y2K Comparison
Unlike broad predictions of superintelligent machines overthrowing humanity, these vulnerabilities resemble conventional computer-security problems.
They involve identifiable mechanisms, specific software configurations, and failures that engineers can attempt to reproduce.
That makes them more comparable to the technical issues underlying Y2K than to an open-ended apocalypse forecast.
The relevant questions are testable.
Can the exploit be reproduced? Has it been patched? Can independent researchers verify the repair? Does monitoring cover the activity it is supposed to cover?
Y2K also demonstrated that the absence of catastrophe does not necessarily mean the underlying technical problem was imaginary. Preventive engineering matters.
The same principle applies here.
The Archival Finding
The October 23 development crosses an important threshold for this series.
Independent researchers identified multiple concrete weaknesses in an advanced AI developer’s internal monitoring architecture.
The assessment is limited by its historical scope, restricted public disclosure, and unverified remediation claims.
Nevertheless, the underlying engineering questions are real and measurable.
The appropriate response is independent testing, stronger separation between agents and monitors, reliable activity logging, and verification that reported fixes actually work.
Human extinction remains speculative.
The possibility of AI agents escaping imperfect oversight is no longer merely hypothetical.
That is the development worth recording.
APA-Style Source List
OpenAI. (2026, October 20). Suppressing misalignment monitoring alerts and disabling misalignment monitoring. OpenAI Alignment. https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/
Rein, D., & Kaufman, A. (2026, October 22). Red-teaming OpenAI’s internal agent monitoring systems. METR. https://metr.substack.com/p/2026-10-22-red-teaming-openai-agent-monitoring
Reuters. (2026, October 21). OpenAI says its AI agents weakened internal monitoring system. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openai-says-its-ai-agents-weakened-internal-monitoring-system-2026-10-21/
Reuters. (2026, October 22). External evaluators find flaws in OpenAI’s AI monitoring system in pilot review. https://www.reuters.com/business/ai-safety-group-metr-finds-flaws-openais-internal-monitoring-system-2026-10-22/
#AI #AICatastropheWatch #AILossOfControl #AIMonitoring #AISafety #ArtificialIntelligence #AutonomousAIAgents #chatgpt #cybersecurity #OpenAI #OpenAIChatGPT #Technology -
DATE: October 22, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: How long does it take to feel forgiven by God? New study tracks Christians day by day after wrongdoing
After committing a moral wrongdoing, Christian adults who initially feel unforgiven by God tend to experience rapid increases in both repentance and feelings of divine forgiveness during the first few days, followed by a gradual leveling off over the next two weeks. New research published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality suggests that actively turning back to God in repentance tends to precede the internal sense of being pardoned, which in turn was modestly linked to a renewed sense of spiritual closeness.
Reconciliation with God is the psychological and spiritual process of restoring relational harmony with the divine after a believer feels they have violated moral or religious standards. In Christian traditions, maintaining an ongoing, intimate bond with God (often referred to as communion) is a central life aim. Becoming aware of a personal sin or wrongdoing can disrupt that bond, creating inner unrest, guilt, and spiritual strain.
To repair that strain, believers often move through two connected processes: engaging in repentance and experiencing absolution. Repentance is an active, approach-oriented response where a person acknowledges their wrongdoing and turns back toward God rather than withdrawing in shame. Experiencing absolution is the receptive counterpart, characterized by an internal assurance that God is moving toward the believer with mercy and has wiped away their guilt.
While psychologists have extensively studied how people forgive one another or themselves, the psychological dynamics of divine forgiveness have received far less empirical attention. In the interpersonal realm, a 2010 longitudinal study demonstrated that forgiving another person after an offense tends to follow a curve of diminishing returns, rising rapidly in the immediate aftermath before gradually leveling off. More recently, scholars began looking at how spiritual repair unfolds over time; for instance, a 2024 two-study investigation indicated that actively seeking God’s pardon is an initial step that predicts whether a person actually feels forgiven six to twelve weeks later.
Other recent work has highlighted how everyday shifts in feeling pardoned by God can ripple outward into daily life. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in July 2026 found that on days when individuals felt more forgiven by God than usual, they were more forgiving and willing to make amends with their romantic partners.
The new study was conducted by Richard G. Cowden, a research scientist with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University (which coordinates the Global Forgiveness Movement) and the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Kaye V. Cook, dean of the School of Psychology and Human Services at Gordon College. Building on a theoretical framework that positions repentance and absolution within a broader system of spiritual closeness and struggle, the authors designed their study to track the exact day-by-day timeline of divine reconciliation immediately after a moral misstep.
“Most studies have taken a relatively faith-neutral approach to divine forgiveness,” Cowden and Cook told PsyPost. “That can be useful for identifying processes that may be shared across religious traditions, but it may overlook beliefs, practices, and relational meanings that are especially important within a particular faith tradition. In the Christian faith, for example, personal wrongdoing may be understood not only as moral failure but also as personal sin that can disrupt one’s sense of communion with God.”
“Our earlier work showed that many Christians may affirm that God is forgiving while still struggling to personally experience God’s forgiveness following specific instances of wrongdoing,” the researchers explained. “To explore how this experience unfolds over time, we focused on two related experiences within a Christian-sensitive understanding of experiencing reconciliation with God.”
“We wanted to know how these two processes unfold in the days after Christians become aware of a particular instance of wrongdoing,” Cowden and Cook added. “Does engaging in repentance with God tend to precede experiencing absolution from God, or vice versa? Do they develop together? And how are they related to a renewed sense of communion with God?”
To capture this process as it unfolded in real time, the researchers used an online research platform to screen 2,481 practicing Christian adults across the United States. They looked for participants who had committed a specific personal sin within the past 24 hours, could describe the event in writing, and currently felt little to no assurance that God had forgiven them for it. From this screening, 175 eligible adults enrolled in the main study and completed surveys on Days 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 following their wrongdoing.
“One distinctive feature of the study is that participants answered questions about the same instance of personal wrongdoing on Days 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 of the study,” Cowden and Cook noted. “This allowed us to examine change within each person rather than simply comparing people at one point in time.”
The sample ranged in age from 19 to 78, with an average age of about 42, and was roughly 59 percent female and 74 percent White. Participants represented a variety of Christian traditions, primarily identifying as Catholic (38 percent), nondenominational (23 percent), or Baptist (16 percent). The recent wrongdoings they described were most often rated as moderate in severity (40 percent), with the most common offenses involving sexual sin (22 percent), anger or resentment (21 percent), and dishonesty or lying (15 percent).
At each of the five survey waves, participants were reminded of the specific wrongdoing they had written about and rated their current levels of repentance and absolution on a 4-point scale. They also answered questions measuring their current sense of communion with God on a 5-point scale. On the first day, the researchers additionally measured participants’ general perception of God as benevolent versus strict, their baseline tendency to feel forgiven by God across life in general, and their divine struggles, meaning feelings of conflict, anger, or fear of punishment in their relationship with God since the incident.
When testing which factors predicted faster or slower change, the authors controlled for a wide range of background factors. These included age, sex, race, education, marital status, geographic region, frequency of prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance, as well as adverse childhood experiences, Big Five personality traits, and baseline anxiety and depression.
By comparing several mathematical growth models, the researchers found that both repentance and absolution followed a logarithmic trajectory over the 16-day window. In plain terms, both processes showed rapid increases during the first few days after the wrongdoing, followed by progressively smaller gains that tapered off over the second week. Although the two processes tended to rise in tandem across participants, they started at different levels and moved at different speeds.
On Day 1, average repentance scores were already relatively high at 2.52 out of 4, whereas feelings of absolution started lower at 1.90 out of 4. Over the 16 days, however, absolution increased at a steeper rate than repentance (growth estimates of 0.28 versus 0.19). At the same time, individual patterns varied considerably from person to person, and where a participant started on Day 1 had almost no bearing on how quickly their scores changed over the two weeks.
“Among Christians, taking appropriate responsibility for personal sin before God and experiencing God’s forgiveness are connected, but they are not the same thing,” the researchers said. “A Christian may acknowledge wrongdoing and turn toward God in repentance while still struggling to experience absolution from God.”
“On average, both engaging in repentance with God and experiencing absolution from God increased most quickly early in the study and then leveled off, but people differed quite substantially in how these experiences unfolded,” Cowden and Cook added. “The findings therefore do not establish a universal timetable for when a Christian should feel forgiven or how the process of experiencing divine forgiveness ought to unfold.”
When looking at what predicted faster spiritual recovery, the researchers found that ongoing relational experiences with God mattered more than abstract beliefs about God’s character. General perceptions of God as benevolent and a person’s general trait tendency to feel forgiven did not meaningfully alter the speed of change for either process. By contrast, participants who reported fewer divine struggles on Day 1 experienced steeper increases in both repentance (a growth rate of 0.23 for those with low struggles versus 0.15 for those with high struggles) and absolution (0.34 versus 0.22).
In addition, a stronger baseline sense of communion with God on Day 1 predicted a steeper rise in feeling absolved over the 16 days (a growth rate of 0.33 for those with high initial communion compared to 0.23 for those with low communion). This suggests that feeling close to God and free of spiritual conflict may provide a supportive foundation for internalizing forgiveness after a misstep.
“One particularly interesting finding was that the quality of participants’ lived relationship with God was more consistently associated with rates of change than their more general beliefs about God,” Cowden and Cook said. “An important contribution is showing why it helps to ask about both engaging in repentance with God and experiencing absolution from God. Simply asking, ‘Do you feel forgiven by God?’ misses whether someone is also acknowledging the wrongdoing and turning toward God, as well as how those experiences relate over time.”
The researchers also examined how fluctuations within an individual from one survey to the next predicted their responses on the very next survey. When a participant reported a higher-than-usual spike in repentance at one time point, they tended to report higher levels of absolution at the following assessment. The reverse was not true: spikes in feeling absolved did not predict subsequent changes in repentance.
Looking at downstream spiritual outcomes, experiencing a higher-than-usual increase in absolution at one wave modestly predicted a stronger sense of communion with God at the next wave. Fluctuations in repentance alone did not directly predict subsequent shifts in communion, and the link between absolution and later communion fell just short of statistical significance when both processes were analyzed together, likely because they overlap so closely. Taken together, the findings are consistent with a sequence in which repentance tends to come before feeling pardoned, and feeling pardoned tends to come before a renewed sense of closeness with God, though the evidence for that second step was weaker.
“These findings offer tentative evidence that experiencing absolution from God may precede a deeper sense of relational harmony with God, but leave unclear whether it has an association independent of engaging in repentance with God given that the two processes tended to unfold together,” the researchers explained. “One possible practical implication is that supporting Christians after personal sin may involve attending to both sides of experiencing reconciliation with God: taking wrongdoing seriously through engaging in repentance with God while also helping individuals more fully receive and internalize God’s forgiveness.”
There are a few caveats to keep in mind when interpreting these results. The study was not preregistered. Because the researchers intentionally selected Christian adults who still felt unforgiven up to 24 hours after their transgression, the findings may not apply to believers who immediately feel at peace with God after making a mistake. This screening approach may have also favored individuals who view God’s forgiveness as conditional upon human repentance rather than automatic, which could help explain why repentance preceded absolution in the timeline.
“We studied the psychological experience of reconciliation with God,” Cowden and Cook emphasized. “We could not determine whether God had forgiven someone, when God forgave them, or what theologically constitutes divine forgiveness.”
“The finding that engaging in repentance with God tended to precede experiencing absolution from God does not mean that Christians must earn God’s forgiveness through engaging in repentance with God,” the authors continued. “Rather, it describes the temporal ordering of two experiences. In some Christian understandings, forgiveness may be freely available while repentance helps a person become more able to receive or internalize it. Because this was an observational study, the temporal patterns are suggestive and should not be interpreted as demonstrating causality.”
In addition, about half of the participants committed their wrongdoing between 12 and 24 hours before the screener survey, and Day 1 repentance scores were already relatively high. Because some initial spiritual repair had likely already begun before the first measurement, future studies could track individuals even closer to the moment of a transgression. Finally, the participants who completed all five surveys attended church more frequently and had higher general perceptions of divine forgiveness than those who missed at least one survey, which raises the possibility of some attrition bias. Testing these patterns across other Christian traditions and other religions will also be important.
Looking ahead, the researchers are exploring practical ways to help believers navigate spiritual distress after moral missteps. “We have developed a freely available self-directed intervention to support Christians who are struggling to experience reconciliation with God following specific instances of personal wrongdoing, which is called the RECEIVE Forgiveness workbook,” Cowden and Cook told PsyPost. “We have completed a randomized controlled trial showing initial efficacy in a sample of adult Indonesian Christians, and we are looking to conduct further trials in other cultures and contexts.”
“More broadly, we are interested in understanding how engaging in repentance with God, experiencing absolution from God, and experiencing reconciliation with God differ across cultures and Christian traditions, particularly traditions that differ in beliefs and practices related to addressing personal wrongdoing and receiving divine forgiveness,” the researchers concluded. “We also want to understand why some Christians are able to internalize God’s forgiveness relatively readily after personal sin, whereas others remain caught in guilt, shame, divine struggle, or perceived distance from God. We are also interested in whether changes in reconciliation with God contribute over time to renewed communion with God and flourishing more broadly across different aspects of life.”
The study, “Temporal Dynamics of Experiencing Reconciliation With God After Personal Wrongdoing: An Incident-Anchored Longitudinal Study of U.S. Christian Adults,” was authored by Richard G. Cowden and Kaye V. Cook.
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Most teams check an LLM-assisted decision system for fairness by comparing approval rates across groups. That check can pass cleanly while the model is still changing its mind on individual cases for reasons nobody would defend out loud. Recent fairness-stress work on LLM decision-making points at a better default test - and it's a decision you can make before writing any code.
Aggregate Parity Nets Out; Per-Case Instability Doesn't
The choice is between two measurements. Outcome parity asks: across 1,000 applications, did group A get approved at roughly the same rate as group B? Counterfactual stress asks something narrower and harder: for this one application, if I change only a decision-irrelevant field - the name, the phrasing of the same request, the order of the bullet points - does the answer move?A model that favors one group on early-career cases and another on senior cases can show perfect parity overall. Parity is cheap and it's what regulators often ask for, but it averages. Per-case stress testing catches that, because it never aggregates across people - it compares a case to itself.
The trade-off is real. Stress testing costs N× the inference calls, and it requires someone to declare which fields are decision-irrelevant. That list is a policy judgment, not an engineering one, which is exactly why a PM should define it.
Running the Test on One Application
base = {"years_exp": 6, "skills": "python, sql"}
names = ["Alex Chen", "Aisha Khan", "John Smith", "Priya Patel"]votes = [decide(tmpl, {**base, "name": n})
for n in names
for tmpl in PROMPT_TEMPLATES] # 3 paraphrases, same instructionflip_rate = 1 - max(votes.count(v) for v in set(votes)) / len(votes)
Twelve variants of one application that a human reviewer would call identical. Any
flip_rateabove zero means the decision moved on something that shouldn't matter.The number alone isn't the point - the pattern is. Read the flips two ways:
- Clustered - all rejections land on the same name group across all three paraphrases. That's bias. Fix it in the prompt, the retrieval data, or the model choice.
- Scattered - flips appear randomly across names and templates. That's instability. Lower the temperature, constrain the output format, or stop auto-deciding borderline cases.
Both fail the same test and need different fixes, which is why one aggregate percentage can't tell you what to do next. Report worst-case flip rate per application, not the mean - the mean hides the cases that would end up in a complaint.
Key Takeaways
- Group-level parity can look clean while individual decisions flip on irrelevant details; counterfactual stress testing compares each case against itself and catches what averages hide.
- Separate clustered flips (bias - fix prompt, data, or model) from scattered flips (instability - fix sampling, output constraints, or add human review).
- The hard part isn't the code, it's agreeing on which input fields are decision-irrelevant. That list belongs to product and policy, not just engineering.
Which fields in your decision prompt would your team actually agree are irrelevant - and how long would that meeting take?
Sources referenced: FairStress: A deeper evaluation of fairness in LLM decision-making, Hugging Face Blog#llm #evaluation #fairness #python #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Flip One Field: A Fairness Test That Beats Aggregate Parity -
Maymont Mansion: Amazing Gilded Age Historic Home
Maymont, a mansion in Richmond, Virginia, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Virginia Landmark. Dating to 1893, the Gilded Age mansion was the lavish home built for James and Sallie May (Maymont) Dooley.
Maymont Mansion in Richmond, Virginia. Photo by Linda Aksomitis.Linda’s Pick of the Exhibits
First of all, the mansion is spectacular! It’s probably one of the most lavish historic buildings I’ve ever visited, including some European palaces and castles. It definitely rivals the Hearst Castle in California.
So, picking a favorite room was tough. However, I have to say it was the dining room that “spoke” the loudest to me in the end.
Why? Probably because the room and place settings do an amazing job of showcasing the lifestyles of the era’s high society.
Formal dining room at Maymont Mansion. Photo by Linda Aksomitis.Of course, the room is filled with paintings and sculptures and ornate furnishings. But it was the place settings that really amazed me.
I was used to the forks, knives, and spoons for each course. What I wasn’t familiar with was the range of glassware.
Place setting in the dining room of the Maymont Mansion. Photo by Linda Aksomitis.It was obvious that each type of glass, like each piece of silverware, was designed for a specific purpose. So this table was set for four different types of wine or sherry or champagne.
What types of glasses were used in late 1800s?Research showed me that I was correct!
- Claret glass: A larger stemmed glass designed for serving Bordeaux red wine (claret).
- Wine hock: A tall, often green or amber, stemmed glass used for German Rhine wines or hock.
- Sherry / Port glass: Often called cordials, these smaller, narrow-bowled stemmed glasses served fortified wines like sherry or port.
- Champagne glass: A glass that was broad, shallow and saucer-like or a tall fluted glass.
- Rummer: A heavy short-stemmed glass used to serve wines, punches, or grog.
- Bohemian glass: A gold-bodied glass with dark, geometric “inserts” or windows known as panels or cabochons used to serve post-dinner liqueurs or cordials.
- Goblet: A general term for formal stemmed glasses.
Hmm, so if I was to guess, I’d say:
- The clear glass on the left was a claret glass. The hosts would have served the Bordeaux red wine in it with first courses.
- The red glass with designs is a wine hock glass. The stem with the two triangular shapes meeting in the middle is described as a waisted hexagon/facet cut. Its deep red bowl is ruby or cranberry glass with detailed gold etching, making the glass late 1800s Victorian Bohemian crystal. Hosts would have served German Rhine wines in it for middle courses.
- The glass with the deeper bowl was a classic British rummer. Hosts would have served a table wine, flip, or mulled punch for last courses.
- The last glass is a cute little Bohemian glass. It would have been used for a final dessert-type drink of a liqueur or cordial.
What’s at the Maymont Mansion?
The Maymont Mansion was a bequest to the city of Richmon from Sallie Dooley, fulfilling her husband’s wishes in 1925. What was in the bequest? One hundred acres to be used as a free park for city residents to enjoy. The mansion and its furnishings.
Eventually, of course, the mansion deteriorated without a cash fund to maintain it. A restoration began, and in 1975 the Maymont Foundation was established to care for the estate that’s still owned by the city. In 2025, the Foundation also did an additional 11.75 million restoration.
Maymont Mansion
The Maymont Mansion is built in a Romanesque Revival style. It has 33 rooms, with a number of the formal rooms included in the house tour. While 33 rooms sounds like the Mansion should be enormous, a number of the rooms are actually quite small. Twelve of the rooms are restored and open to the public.
Sallie Dooley’s room, with its magnificent swan bed, Louis Vuitton trunk and Tiffany dressing table crafted with sterling silver and narwhal tusks. Photo by Linda Aksomitis.Of course, the furnishings are amazing, being all original. In total, Maymont says the bequeathed collection totals 949 objects and the library has 1226 volumes from the Dooley’s library.
Ever dreamt of owning a collection of Tiffany pieces? A Style Weekly article indicated that the Maymont collection is the most complete, intact historic site from the period when Tiffany’s was the country’s most prestigious source of luxury goods!
While the guided tour ends with the formal rooms, visitors also have access to the domestic service rooms.
Butler’s room in the Maymont Mansion with the cast iron bed, simple furnishings and black work suit. Photo by Linda Aksomitis.This area provides an interesting contrast between the lifestyles of the rich and the servants who made their lives easier.
Fast Fact: During the Guilded Age, the employment of an English butler became the ultimate status symbol in the North. In the South, menservants were hired more often than in other regions. However, men made up a small percentage of household workers overall. By 1893, less than 10% of Richmond’s domestic labor force was male. As domestic staff, men received higher wages and served in more visible positions than women. Butlers were valued not only for their skills but also for a polished demeanor.
~ Maymont Mansion signageThe Grounds
The areas near the mansion include historic lawns and gardens, the Carriage House and water tower, and the barn and welcome center.
Highlights include:
- The Japanese Garden with its waterfall, bridge, lanterns and pavilions.
- The Via Florum and Italian Garden walkway of flowers between the terraced garden and the mansion.
- The three-story brick and granite barn that serves as a welcome center.
- The Dooley mausoleum where the couple is buried.
More on the Estate
The park, like the rest of the estate, is a beautiful greenspace. You’ll find:
- Robins Nature Center: A building with nearly 30,000 gallons of aquaria showcasing animals native to the James River and Chesapeake Bay.
- Virginia Wildlife Trail: Outdoor habitats for black bears, bison, a bobcat, deer, foxes, coyotes, porcupines, and raptors.
- Maymont Farm: A children’s farm with hands-on animal encounters.
Fast Fact: Before the Dooleys built the mansion the land had been a rural dairy farm overlooking the James River. The estate added Maymont Farm in 1903.
Linda’s Road Trip Tips
Richmond is an amazing city to visit! I found it friendly, both in terms of talking to local people and in city features such as free buses.
People were quick to help, without being asked, whenever I was confused walking or picking a bus route. Leaving the Amtrak station the staircase to the street is high, and while I was struggling to get my bags down them, a teen sitting on the other side just stood and carried them down for me.
But the gem to me was getting to the Mansion. My Uber had dropped me at the wrong entrance, so I was walking to get to my scheduled tour. I asked various people for help, which was always given. However, when I asked an older resident how far away I was, she simply got her car keys and gave me a ride! Now that’s A++ for a directionally challenged tourist!
I stayed at the very comfortable Omni Richmond Hotel downtown in the historic Shockoe Slip District. It was close, just a short walk, to the Greater Richmond Convention Center. On the way, I walked through the historic Capitol Square.
Bison meatloaf. Photo by Linda Aksomitis.And meals? While I had many tasty ones, the best one was at Southern Railway Taphouse in Shockoe Slip. It’s a restaurant and bar with a patio facing the canal. My dinner? An excellent bison meatloaf. It was served with caramelized shallot gravy, garlic mashed potatoes, and sautéed green beans. Delicious!
Who Should Visit Maymont Mansion?
Maymont Mansion is an amazing attraction for Gilded Age and architecture fans. With its luxury and opulence preserved for 135+ years, the mansion can’t help but impress even the most well-traveled visitor.
Pin me!Anyone who loves decorative arts or is a Tiffany enthusiast will also find lots of treasures to keep them fascinated. Since visitors see both the elite lifestyle and the worker lifestyle, there are great insights into what separated the classes.
I wouldn’t recommend the mansion for families with small children. Strollers aren’t permitted due to the size of rooms and walkways.
Likewise, due to the historic integrity of the well-preserved home, tours aren’t wheelchair accessible.
However, the Robins Nature Center is fully wheelchair and stroller accessible. The gardens have limited access in some portions.
When it comes to time, I spent an hour-and-a-half going through the mansion. I didn’t, however, go anywhere on the grounds other than the walkway from the parking area.
How Do You Visit Maymont Mansion?
There are three entrances to Maymont Mansion. Access the mansion at the Hampton Street Entrance (1700 Hampton Street), the Robins Nature Center through the Shields Lake Drive Entrance (2201 Shields Lake Drive in Byrd Park), and the Children’s Farm and Wildlife Exhibits at the Spottswood Entrance near the Boulevard Bridge.
Parking: The Hampton Street Entrance and Shields Drive Entrance both have free parking areas.
Street address: 1700 Hampton Street (Maymont Mansion), Richmond, Virginia.
Find hours and days open (typically just Thursday-Sundays) on the Maymont website.
Keep up to date with what’s happening on the Maymont Facebook page.
Take the In Service and Beyond Virtual Tour on the Maymont website.
Plan your visit with Google Maps.
#history #lifestyles #museums #richAndFamous #travel #US -
DATE: October 22, 2026 at 03:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Haunted houses may bring people closer, but psychological research suggests the bonding really happens on the ride home
A new study published in the journal Emotion provides evidence that visiting a haunted house with others is linked to feeling more connected to them. People who felt more scared, and who held hands or made physical contact, were more likely to say the experience brought them closer, though before-and-after closeness ratings barely changed, and interviews suggested that talking about the experience afterward may be where much of the bonding happens.
Humans are highly social creatures, and forming bonds with others is strongly linked to overall health and psychological well-being. Scientists have gathered substantial evidence showing that sharing positive emotions, like laughing at a comedy show or cheering at a concert, amplifies interpersonal closeness. A separate line of research suggests that negative emotions, specifically fear, also push people to seek out the company of others. When people face a common threat, they often prefer to face it together rather than alone.
Beyond simply seeking company, shared emotional arousal can create a sense of unity. Previous studies indicate that fear can spread from person to person, synchronizing heart rates and potentially reinforcing group cohesion. Most previous experiments exploring the link between fear and social bonding relied on artificial laboratory settings or situations involving genuine threats. The researchers wanted to investigate how fear affects relationships in a recreational context, where the threat is entirely simulated.
Jane Wiley conducted this research as an undergraduate student at the University of Florida and is now an incoming social psychology doctoral student at the University of Virginia. The project grew out of a passion Wiley shares with their faculty advisor and the study’s senior author, Lawton K. “Ken” Swan.
“He and I are huge horror and haunted house fans,” Wiley told PsyPost. “We have shared plenty of stories (and have heard many others from haunted house guests) of how going through a haunted house together can be a strong bonding experience.”
Wiley noted that anecdotal success stories served as inspiration for the project. “A first date he had at Halloween Horror Nights led to a happy marriage, and I got very close with a best friend — Garrett Johnson, another author of the paper — after we went through a haunted house together,” they said. “This interpersonal focus had not been researched in recreational fear literature when we began, so that was what drew us to studying what we did.”
Millions of people seek out recreational fear every year by riding roller coasters, watching horror movies, or visiting haunted attractions. The scientists designed this project to test whether the fear experienced in these playful, safe environments translates into stronger social ties. They wanted to know if the temporary thrill of a scare can generate a lasting sense of interpersonal warmth among friends, family members, and acquaintances.
To explore these ideas, Wiley and their colleagues at the University of Florida conducted a series of five studies over three Halloween seasons at a commercial haunted attraction in Florida, the Gainesville Fear Garden. In the first study, the team surveyed 986 attraction attendees immediately after they finished a sensory deprivation haunted house. The participants answered questions on a 7-point scale regarding how much fear they felt, how much they enjoyed the attraction, and whether the experience brought them closer to the person in their group they already felt closest to. The researchers also asked if participants communicated or held hands with their companion during the event.
About 48 percent of participants agreed that the experience brought them closer to their companion. Higher levels of reported fear predicted a stronger feeling of having bonded, with each additional point of fear on the 7-point scale associated with about a fifth of a point higher rating on the bonding question. Holding hands, communicating during the event, and enjoying the experience also predicted higher ratings. This provided preliminary, correlational evidence that shared fear in a fun setting is linked to feeling closer.
To verify these findings and look for measurable changes, the researchers conducted a second study with 500 participants during the next Halloween season. This time, guests completed surveys both immediately before and right after navigating the attraction. This method allowed the scientists to measure shifts in interpersonal closeness. As in the first study, participants were asked to focus on the person in their group they felt closest to.
Once again, the amount of fear a person felt predicted how much they believed the experience brought them closer to their companion, with 58 percent agreeing that the attraction brought them closer. Yet, when the scientists looked at the direct difference between the before and after closeness ratings, they found no measurable change: participants rated closeness at an average of 6.27 out of 7 before entering and 6.12 after exiting. The researchers suspected a ceiling effect, meaning that because these participants already rated their relationship so highly before entering the attraction, there was very little mathematical room for their closeness score to increase on a 7-point scale.
For the third study, the researchers adjusted their focus to see if the bonding effect applied to less intimate relationships. They surveyed 554 participants, asking them to focus on the group member they felt the least close to, or someone they argued with most often. Participants were asked if the attraction brought them closer to this specific person, how much fear they felt, and if they made any physical contact.
The scientists found that fear and physical contact remained strong predictors of feeling brought together, even for the least close companions. Approximately 45 percent of participants agreed that the experience made them feel closer to their least close group member. When asked about their party as a whole, an even higher percentage, about 64 percent, felt the experience brought their entire group closer. This suggests that the link between fear and feeling closer is not limited to already-close relationships, and the authors suggest the effect may be even stronger at the group level, though the group and individual figures came from different questions.
In the fourth study, the only one that was preregistered, the researchers again attempted to capture a measurable shift in closeness from before to after the haunted house. They maintained their focus on least close companions to avoid the ceiling effect seen in earlier attempts. The researchers collected complete survey data from 263 attendees who rated their closeness to their least close groupmate before entering and then again after exiting. The team also asked the participants to rate their fear, enjoyment, and physical contact during the immersive 30-minute experience.
The predictive model held up for a fourth time, with fear, physical contact, and enjoyment all predicting perceptions of enhanced closeness. Additionally, the researchers finally detected a statistically significant increase in closeness ratings from before the experience to afterward, rising from 4.61 before entering to 4.81 after exiting, an average increase of just 0.21 points on a 7-point scale. This modest change raised questions about why about half of participants said the experience brought them closer, even though their numerical closeness ratings barely moved.
“Our most surprising finding was when we kept seeing no pre-to-post change in closeness, prior to figuring out that post-haunt reflection is essential for bonding to occur,” Wiley noted.
Wiley added that this lack of initial change was difficult to interpret at first. “This ultimately ended up being a good obstacle to encounter since it led us to transition to qualitative data collection (which helped us deduce the post-experience reflection bit), but it was hard to make sense of at the time,” Wiley said. “So I would say the most surprising finding is that going through a haunted house together alone, without the time to talk and laugh afterwards, does not seem to be sufficient for significant bonding.”
To understand this paradox, the researchers conducted a fifth and final study consisting of face-to-face qualitative interviews. Qualitative research involves gathering non-numerical data, such as conversational responses, to understand underlying concepts, opinions, and motivations. The researchers interviewed 20 guests right after they completed the haunted house and the quantitative survey. They asked the participants what feeling closer meant to them and why their numerical scores might not have changed despite reporting a stronger bond.
In the interviews, 16 of the 20 attendees said that talking, laughing, and swapping stories about the scares afterward, such as on the car ride home, played a central role in making them feel closer. Fourteen described the novelty of the experience as part of its appeal, and many said that relying on one another while blindfolded or frightened created a sense of vulnerability. Twelve commented on the survey itself: some said they had not yet had time to process the experience, and several said they had not distinguished between their overall closeness and their closeness in that moment when answering the questions.
“Haunted houses seem to have the ability to make two people feel closer together, whether these two people were previously very close or not,” Wiley explained. “In other words, going through a haunted attraction with either your best friend or your annoying coworker will likely prove to be beneficial to the relationship. However, this link is quite contingent on what you and that other person do after the experience.”
Wiley emphasized that what happens after the scare may matter most. “Post-haunt reflection is important to the process of bonding: the haunted house on its own may not do much to strengthen the relationship, but if you talk, reminisce, and laugh about the experience afterwards, you’ll probably feel more bonded with that person,” they said.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. All five studies took place at one attraction whose format changed from year to year, and none compared haunted house visitors with people doing a non-scary activity together, so the studies cannot show that fear itself, rather than simply sharing a fun outing, drives the sense of bonding. Closeness was measured with single survey items, only the fourth study was preregistered, and in the interviews, participants were told about the earlier null results before being asked to explain them.
“As there is with any study, ours certainly had limitations,” Wiley noted. “We used convenience samples of people who were already at the haunted house, so not only were race, ability, and income unevenly distributed, but our conclusions can only really be generalized to people who would normally show up at a haunted house with their friends or family (this is a double-edged sword though — we’re interested in recreational fear, so we are particularly interested in people who seek out these experiences on their own time anyway).”
Environmental factors during the surveys might have also influenced the data. “We were surveying people inside the bar of the haunted house, which was a pretty chaotic and high-traffic space: the music was loud, people were drinking, and participants filled out surveys side-by-side with other participants, who in some cases were the people they came with,” Wiley explained. “So it was definitely not a distraction-free environment we were collecting data in, which may have impacted responses. We also only examined the impact of haunted houses in particular, so we cannot make these same conclusions yet about other forms of recreational fear, like horror movies or extreme sports.”
Scaring people together is not a guaranteed relationship fix. Across the studies, only about half of participants agreed the haunted house brought them closer, and a notable minority disagreed. The authors speculate that shared fear might strain a relationship when people’s fear responses are badly mismatched or one person feels unsupported, and they propose that recreational fear may act as an interpersonal stress test: responding to a frightened companion with comfort and humor could reinforce a bond, while failing to do so could weaken it.
Expanding the research could yield useful insights into how shared emotional intensity shapes human connection over time. “We would definitely like to expand on this study, particularly adding an experimental manipulation where some participants have time for post-experience reflection while others don’t, in order to investigate the cause-and-effect relationship,” Wiley said. “We’d also like to see if this bonding pattern exists for other forms of recreational fear.”
The study, “Haunted Attraction: The Effects of Recreational Fear on Interpersonal Bonding,” was authored by Jane K. Wiley, Alexa A. Rivers, Otho Garrett Johnson, Cristina S. Negraru, Jake T. Watson, Tara M. Perreault, Rebecca Martin, Sara C. Slayton, Steffano I. Segovia-Palacios, Benjamin R. Stanisky, Kate E. Doherty, and Lawton K. Swan.
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