#psychologyresearch — Public Fediverse posts

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. **
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TITLE: Haunted houses may bring people closer, but psychological research suggests the bonding really happens on the ride home

URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-benefits-of-frightening-activities-depend-on-what-you-do-afterward-according-to-new-psychology-research/

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.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-benefits-of-frightening-activities-depend-on-what-you-do-afterward-according-to-new-psychology-research/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HauntedHouse #Psychology #SocialPsychology #Relationships #HumanConnection #Fear #Horror #Halloween #PsychologyResearch #Friendship

Did you hear about the academic study that found paranoia is more widespread than previously thought.
However, the data collecting methodology may have been flawed.

#jokeoftheday #PsychologyResearch

DATE: October 20, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: New study suggests touch is a key ingredient in dogs’ stress-buffering power

URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-study-suggests-touch-is-a-key-ingredient-in-dogs-stress-buffering-power/

Stroking a pet dog may not immediately erase the physical toll of a stressful experience, but it appears to prepare the body to handle the next challenge more calmly. A new study published in Biological Psychology indicates that dog owners who physically petted their companions after a high-pressure mental test showed gentler brain and heart responses when facing a second round of stress shortly afterward. Simply sitting near the dog, making eye contact, and talking to it without physical contact did not provide the same protective effect.

Psychologists use the term stress buffering to describe how supportive social contact softens a person’s physical and emotional reaction to difficult situations. In human relationships, affectionate touch is a primary driver of this protection. In one frequently cited experiment, women who received a brief neck and shoulder massage from their partner before giving a speech showed smaller rises in heart rate and the stress hormone cortisol than women whose partners offered only verbal support.

Because many people treat their dogs as family members, scientists have examined whether companion animals offer similar biological protection. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost in August 2025 found that people accompanied by their dogs during a laboratory stress test had smaller spikes in the stress hormone cortisol and a more balanced nervous system reaction than those tested alone.

Isolating physical touch as the specific mechanism behind these benefits has been difficult, because owners typically pet, look at, and talk to their animals all at once. In a 2019 randomized controlled trial of university students, spending 10 minutes petting cats and dogs lowered salivary stress hormone levels more than sitting nearby and watching others pet the animals. However, trials testing whether animal touch calms people down during an active stressor have yielded mixed results. For example, a 2021 laboratory study of adolescents found that touching an unfamiliar therapy dog during a stressful evaluation did not reduce anxiety or physical arousal any more than talking to the dog without touching it.

Other evidence suggests that animal contact might instead act as a preventative shield before a challenge arrives. In a 2017 experiment with undergraduate students, interacting with a therapy dog beforehand muted the physical sweat-gland response when students later tackled a fast-paced math test. Building on this work, study authors Vanessa Kaufmann and Annett Schirmer of the Department of Psychology at the University of Innsbruck and Schirmer’s Brain and Behavior Lab, along with their colleague Xiaoqin Cheng, designed an experiment to isolate physical touch with one’s own dog from other forms of interaction, tracking both immediate stress recovery and resilience to a subsequent stressor.

“Interactions with pets have a long history as therapeutic interventions and a lot of research suggests that they can indeed be good for us,” Kaufmann and Schirmer told PsyPost. “However, little work has been done to uncover potential factors or mechanisms that make human-animal interactions beneficial. Hence, we were interested in the ‘how,’ i.e., what is it about these interactions that might actually produce positive outcomes for the human?”

“Touch seemed like a particularly interesting candidate because physical contact emerges very naturally between people and their pets, and research on human touch has already shown that touch can buffer stress,” the researchers explained. “Therefore, we wanted to examine whether touch with a pet could have a similar effect.”

The researchers recruited 66 dog owners and their pets to visit a university laboratory in Austria. After excluding one person who stopped early and another who had excessive noise in their brain recordings, the final sample included 64 White European adults (51 women and 13 men) with an average age of 34 years. All of the dogs were healthy, over two years old, and comfortable in unfamiliar rooms.

Each participant completed two experimental blocks that followed the same five-step sequence: a five-minute resting baseline, a 10-minute stress test, a one-minute post-stress rest, a five-minute recovery period with their dog, and a five-minute post-recovery rest. During the 10-minute stress test, participants answered rapid-fire general knowledge questions within five seconds and counted backward in fixed steps to the beat of a flashing red dot. To induce social-evaluative stress, which is the anxiety of being negatively judged by others, participants were told their performance was being recorded for later analysis and were monitored over a video call by a staff member who gave only critical feedback.

The two blocks differed only during the five-minute recovery phase in a separate room. In the touch block, the dog roamed freely so the owner could spontaneously pet or hold it. In the no-touch block, the dog was kept on a short leash out of reach, preventing physical contact while still allowing the owner to talk to and make eye contact with their pet. Thirty-one participants completed the touch block first, while 33 completed the no-touch block first.

During the resting and stress phases, the researchers recorded brain activity using a cap with 64 sensors, a method called electroencephalography. They tracked alpha waves, which are slower electrical rhythms in the back of the head that accompany a relaxed mind and drop during stress, and beta waves, which are faster rhythms across the front and sides of the head tied to alertness and mental strain. Forearm sensors measured heart rate and heart rate variability, which tracks tiny beat-to-beat timing fluctuations driven by the calming parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, while self-report scales and video cameras captured participants’ mood and recovery behaviors.

Across both blocks, the mental test reliably triggered stress across multiple bodily systems. Compared to baseline rest, the stress task caused a drop in calming alpha brainwaves, a surge in alert beta brainwaves, a faster heart rate, and lower heart rate variability, with the rise in beta brainwaves lingering into the one-minute rest after the task ended. During the stress test, these physical responses synchronized with one another: stronger rises in beta brainwaves corresponded with faster heart rates, which in turn paired with lower heart rate variability.

By contrast, although participants reported feeling more negative, more tense, and less in control after the stress test, these conscious mood ratings showed almost no statistical connection to the size of their brain or heart changes. Only a small link emerged between higher heart rate variability and feeling calmer. The authors suggest this gap is consistent with research indicating that people’s reports of how stressed they feel may be tied more to context and expectations than to what is happening in their bodies.

When allowed to touch their dogs during the five-minute recovery break, owners spent about 64 percent of the time (roughly three minutes and 12 seconds) in physical contact, primarily stroking the animal’s fur. When the leash prevented touch, owners compensated by spending over 53 additional seconds making direct eye contact with their pets during the five-minute period compared to the touch condition.

“One notable aspect of the study is that participants were not instructed to touch their dogs,” Kaufmann and Schirmer noted. “When physical contact was possible, it emerged naturally, and participants spent about two thirds of the recovery period touching their pet. This highlights how central touch is to the way people naturally interact with their dogs.”

“Touch was very prominent in all the human-pet interactions we recorded, sometimes even when the pet wasn’t really into it,” the researchers added. “It seemed participants had a strong need to be in physical contact. Moreover, when this contact was not possible or allowed in the experiment, participants increased gazing at the dog, possibly as another way to connect.”

Contrary to the researchers’ initial prediction, touching the dog did not speed up immediate recovery: by the post-recovery rest, brainwaves, heart rates, and mood had returned toward baseline at similar rates whether the owner had petted the dog or not. The authors suggest the recovery setup may help explain why an immediate effect did not appear. Reaching out to stroke a moving dog involves physical activity that can mildly raise heart rate, and the extra eye contact in the no-touch condition may have offered its own calming effect by prompting the release of bonding hormones like oxytocin.

Instead, the benefits of touch emerged later, acting as a protective buffer when participants faced the second stress test. Participants who petted their dogs during the first recovery break showed a dampened biological reaction during the second stress test compared to their first stress test. Specifically, after recovering with touch, this group showed less suppression of calming alpha brainwaves throughout the second session, including during the stress test, along with a slower heart rate and higher heart rate variability during the second challenge itself, while also reporting a greater sense of control. Among participants who touched their dog first, the second-session differences had standardized effect sizes of about 0.36 for alpha, 0.40 for heart rate variability, and 0.72 for heart rate.

Participants prevented from touching their dogs during the first recovery break did not show these protective biological shifts during the second stress test; the differences in their alpha waves, heart rate, and heart rate variability between the two stress sessions were not statistically significant. Although this group reported feeling less tense after the second test, their beta brainwaves pointed to elevated tension during the second baseline period. Self-reported feelings showed an inconsistent pattern across the two groups and did not line up well with the physiological measures. Additional statistical models confirmed that the physiological results were not altered by the dog’s fur length, how much the dog whined or barked, or how worried owners felt about their pets.

“Our findings suggest that physical contact with a pet may reduce how strongly the body reacts to a subsequent stressful situation,” Kaufmann and Schirmer said. “Interestingly, there was no difference in how stressed participants reported feeling, suggesting that physiological buffering can occur without us necessarily being consciously aware of it.”

“While the effects were moderate in magnitude, we saw a consistent pattern across several physiological measures,” the researchers pointed out. “Brain activity, heart rate, and heart-rate variability all pointed toward a less pronounced physiological response to the subsequent stressor after participants had touched their dog. However, it remains unclear how effects observed in such a controlled laboratory setting translate to stressful situations in everyday life.”

The brainwave findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which similarly found that hands-on activities with dogs boosted relaxing alpha wave activity, though that earlier study measured immediate brain activity during calm interactions rather than buffering against a laboratory stressor. The authors speculate that stroking a dog’s coat stimulates specialized nerve fibers in human skin that respond to gentle, slow touch and send soothing signals to the brain. While these nerve fibers are scarce on the hairless palms of the hands, video recordings showed that owners mostly ran their fingers through their dogs’ fur, stimulating the sides and backs of the fingers where these receptors are present.

As with all research, there are some caveats to keep in mind. The study’s preregistered prediction, that touch would speed recovery right after the first stress test, was not supported. The protective effect on the second test came from an exploratory analysis, so it will need to be confirmed in a study designed to test it directly. In addition, the researchers cannot entirely rule out the possibility that touching the dog changed how much mental effort participants put into the second test, which could also lower physiological responses.

Participants also spoke out loud during the stress test but sat silently during rest. Because speaking changes breathing patterns, which directly influence heart rhythms, some cardiac changes during the stress test could reflect speaking or task effort rather than pure emotional stress, especially since a secondary, respiration-linked measure of heart rate variability did not replicate the main touch effect.

“Our findings provide causal evidence for a stress-buffering effect of touch under controlled laboratory conditions and as such support prior correlational observations that pet owners who engage in more physical contact with their pets report greater wellbeing,” Kaufmann and Schirmer told PsyPost. “However, real-life stress is varied and complex and it remains unclear whether different types of stress may differently benefit from touch. We also studied people interacting with their own dogs, so we cannot assume that the same effects would occur when interacting with an unfamiliar animal.”

The team also emphasized that the comfort of the animal is just as important as the comfort of the human. “Lastly, we would like to highlight the wellbeing of the animal who may or may not seek touch,” the researchers said. “Physical contact with another being should always be mutually wanted and positive.”

Sample makeup is another consideration, as around 80 percent of the participants were women and all were White Europeans. Future studies will need to test whether the findings hold across more diverse samples, examine other everyday stressors, and compare interacting with one’s own pet at home against interacting with an unfamiliar animal.

“A next step is to understand more precisely what it is about physical contact with an animal that produces these effects,” Kaufmann and Schirmer explained. “We are interested in both bottom-up mechanisms, such as how different characteristics of touch and the resulting sensory signals contribute to stress regulation, and top-down mechanisms, such as the relationship with the animal, expectations, or the meaning of the interaction.”

“One approach to tackle bottom-up mechanisms involves a closer look at how people touch,” the researchers continued. “Here we found that they primarily use their fingers relative to other body parts including the palm. Moreover, preliminary data suggests that contact with the fingers is particularly pleasurable, possibly because they are densely innervated by mechanoreceptors.”

The study, “Pet-induced stress buffering depends on touch: Evidence from brain and cardiac measures,” was authored by Vanessa Kaufmann, Xiaoqin Cheng, and Annett Schirmer.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/new-study-suggests-touch-is-a-key-ingredient-in-dogs-stress-buffering-power/

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