Doing Well: The Wellbeing Science Insights Podcast · Life Management Science Labs

Coltan Scrivner, Ph.D.: Morbid Curiosity – Confronting The Upcoming Threats | Doing Well #73

·42 min·2 clips

During the pandemic, horror movies had “their best year at the box office in history.”

1. Doing Well: The Wellbeing Science Insights Podcast centers this episode on morbid curiosity and confronting upcoming threats. 2. Lu Mo hosts and Colton Scrivner, a behavioral scientist at Aarhus University and Arizona State University, brings the research because he studies morbid curiosity and is writing Morbidly Curious for Penguin Books in 2025. 3. The episode asks why people seek out scary material and whether safe exposure to fear can support wellbeing. 4. Colton traces his interest back to violence as entertainment, using the Coliseum, boxing, mixed martial arts, and football as examples. 5. He says he noticed people pay money for haunted houses and scary movies even though they usually avoid fear in daily life. 6. Colton describes reaching out to a literature scholar in Denmark and doing a haunted attraction study at Aarhus University. 7. Lu Mo says she avoids true crime and mentions watching The Tinder Swindler because friends kept recommending it. 8. Colton says morbid curiosity is interest in something potentially threatening, including fictional stories, true crime, haunted houses, and other safe exposures. 9. He argues that the label “morbid” refers to the topic, not to the curiosity itself being bad. 10. Colton says some people high in morbid curiosity showed more positive resilience during April 2020 and still did so in a follow-up one or two months later. 11. He connects that result to the idea that practicing fear in a safe setting can build resilience in stressful real-world contexts. 12. He says horror movies had their best year at the box office in history during the pandemic, with another spike in 2021. 13. He also describes a movie-store study where anxious or nervous customers were more likely to rent horror movies than comedies or romances. 14. Colton explains that anxiety can make people more vigilant to threats, which is why some anxious viewers prefer scary films. 15. He says a scary movie can redirect anxiety toward a fictional threat, where the viewer has more control over the volume, lights, or pause button. 16. He links that process to emotion regulation skills taught in cognitive behavioral therapy and says the movie ending can trigger a relaxing parasympathetic response. 17. The interview style is conversational, with Lu Mo speaking from personal avoidance of horror and testing ideas against her own habits. 18. The tone stays reflective and practical, moving from definitions to studies, then to coping strategies and everyday examples. 19. People curious about horror, true crime, and resilience would likely enjoy this episode. 20. Listeners who want no discussion of scary media may skip it.

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