Uffe Schjoedt

Who they are

Uffe Schjoedt is known on this site through one paper, a field study published in Psychological Science in 2020 with Marc Malmdorf Andersen, Henry C. W. Price, Fernando E. Rosas, Coltan Scrivner and Mathias Clasen.

Key papers

Playing with fear: A field study in recreational horror (2020). The study followed 110 visitors to a haunted attraction, aged 12 to 57. Researchers recorded each person's heart rate, filmed the scare points and collected repeated self-reports of fear and enjoyment. Enjoyment followed an inverted U against fear: it rose as fear rose, then fell once fear became too strong. Feeling frightened tracked large-scale changes in heart rate in a straight line, while enjoyment followed an inverted U with small-scale fluctuations. The paper appeared in volume 31, issue 12.

Key ideas

The authors suggest the pattern reflects arousal that is just right. A person enjoys being scared up to a point, and beyond that point the same sensations stop being fun. The finding is the field-based support for the inverted-U account of fear and enjoyment, and it is the main source for the article on why people enjoy horror films.

The same research group also studied how visitors manage their own fear. A companion paper, by Mathias Clasen, Marc Malmdorf Andersen and Uffe Schjoedt, compared thrill-seekers, who wanted maximal fear, with fear-avoiders, who wanted minimal fear. Both groups used cognitive, behavioural and social strategies to raise or lower their arousal.

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