ArticlePersonality and individual differences2021
Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Personality and individual differences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
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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
19 citing papers in PubMed, 121 citations in OpenAlex.
- Out of the dark - Psychological perspectives on people's fascination with true crime.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 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
- Horror Fandom, morbid curiosity, and psychological resilience amid war conflict and economic crisis among university students in Lebanon: a cross-sectional study.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- A Threat Management Approach to Explaining Women's Aversive Rape Fantasies.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- Ruptures as Imagined and Theorized: Symbolic Resources for Dealing With the Unexpected.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2025Article
- Bibliotherapy for stress management: a wellness intervention for first-year medical students.Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA · 2025Article
- (Re)Considering the jump scare in four elements.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Music as an Evolved Tool for Socio-Affective Fiction.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2024Article
- The role of excitement and enjoyment through subjective evaluation of horror film scenes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Surfing uncertainty with screams: predictive processing, error dynamics and horror films.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Measurement invariance and latent mean differences of the morbid curiosity scale (MCS) across the United States and China.Heliyon · 2023Article
- Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Effect of COVID-19 Safety Protocols on Hospital Workers' Mental Health: A Moderated-Mediation Model of COVID-19 Anxiety and Psychological Resilience.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Coping with COVID- 19 pandemic stressors: Comparisons between non-players and players, and levels of Game Transfer Phenomena.Entertainment computing · 2022Article
- Cinema's Terrifying Realities: Pandemics, Zombification, and SARS-COV-2.Clinical medicine & research · 2022Article
- Imagination: A New Foundation for the Science of Mind.Biological theory · 2022Review
- Does Perceived Stress of University Students Affected by Preferences for Movie Genres? an Exploratory Cross-Sectional Study in China.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Catharsis Through Cinema: An Italian Qualitative Study on Watching Tragedies to Mitigate the Fear of COVID-19.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- First They Scream, Then They Laugh: The Cognitive Intersections of Humor and Fear.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds. Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study (n = 310) tested whether past and current engagement with thematically relevant media fictions, including horror and pandemic films, was associated with greater preparedness for and psychological resilience toward the pandemic. Since morbid curiosity has previously been associated with horror media use during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also tested whether trait morbid curiosity was associated with pandemic preparedness and psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of "prepper" genres (alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films) exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness. We also found that trait morbid curiosity was associated with positive resilience and interest in pandemic films during the pandemic. Taken together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that exposure to frightening fictions allow audiences to practice effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in real-world situations.
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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.