ArticlePloS one2017
Choosing the negative: A behavioral demonstration of morbid curiosity.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contra-Hedonic Functions of Self-Destructive Behaviors in Adolescents.The International journal of eating disorders · 2026Article
- Out of the dark - Psychological perspectives on people's fascination with true crime.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Distinct motivational factors shape news-seeking in young adults.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Does true crime increase negative affect, or negative affect lead to true crime? A cross-lagged analysis on the dynamics of consuming frightening media.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Role of the striatum in counterfactual information seeking.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- An Integrative Appraisal Model of Epistemic Curiosity.Affective science · 2025Review
- The Impact of Epistemic Curiosity on Traffic Risky Behavior: The Mediating Role of Conformity.PsyCh journal · 2025Article
- Examining disgust learning through category conditioning: Evidence from trial-unique presentations and oculomotor avoidance.Learning & behavior · 2025Article
- Art promotes exploration of negative content.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Comparing competing characterizations suggests there might be more than one type of interest.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Disgust as a basic, sexual, and moral emotion.Cognitive processing · 2024Review
- Surfing uncertainty with screams: predictive processing, error dynamics and horror films.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Smokers' Curiosity Facilitates Recall of Tobacco-Related Health Information.Health communication · 2023Article
- Instructed motivational states bias reinforcement learning and memory formation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Uncertainty drives exploration of negative information across younger and older adults.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Motivations underlying self-infliction of pain during thinking for pleasure.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- An energizing role for motivation in information-seeking during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Ewww-Investigating the neural basis of disgust in response to naturalistic and pictorial nauseating stimuli.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Interactions between ventrolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex during learning and behavioural change.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- A prefrontal network integrates preferences for advance information about uncertain rewards and punishments.Neuron · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This paper examined, with a behavioral paradigm, to what extent people choose to view stimuli that portray death, violence or harm. Based on briefly presented visual cues, participants made choices between highly arousing, negative images and positive or negative alternatives. The negative images displayed social scenes that involved death, violence or harm (e.g., war scene), or decontextualized, close-ups of physical harm (e.g., mutilated face) or natural threat (e.g., attacking shark). The results demonstrated that social negative images were chosen significantly more often than other negative categories. Furthermore, participants preferred social negative images over neutral images. Physical harm images and natural threat images were not preferred over neutral images, but were chosen in about thirty-five percent of the trials. These results were replicated across three different studies, including a study that presented verbal descriptions of images as pre-choice cues. Together, these results show that people deliberately subject themselves to negative images. With this, the present paper demonstrates a dynamic relationship between negative information and behavior and advances new insights into the phenomenon of morbid curiosity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.