Professor Glenn Sparks’ office at Purdue University is filled with collections of written accounts from people providing detailed descriptions of film, television or other visual media experiences they wish they had never encountered.
Now in his 24th year at Purdue, Sparks is well-known for his work in the fright responses of young children to media, but the communications professor has amassed plenty of data over the years on grown-ups, too.
Guess what? Like kids, we can be markedly upset or terrified by images we see, whether it’s a scene in a horror movie or a true story on the nightly news. Also, as with children, those images — and that fear — can stay with us for years, interrupting our sleep, altering our sense of real danger and, sometimes, even changing the way we behave.
Sparks’ research has introduced him to people who were so haunted by “The Silence of the Lambs” and its cannibal anti-hero, they stopped eating meat. “Psycho” still sticks with lone travelers who wonder whether to step into a motel bathtub and pull shut the translucent shower curtain.
“Jaws” changed the habits of countless ocean swimmers, “Poltergeist” still visits folks in unexplained sounds in the night. “The Shining” reverberates in mirrored bathroom reflections, the number 237, elevator doors and dads who become unusually crabby.
Then there is the multi-faceted staying power of “The Exorcist,” in which the sources of terror are both specific and amorphous.
Sure, the “monster” in that 36-year-old movie is Satan, but — down the road and after Regan — in what seemingly innocent form will he next manifest himself? Which undeserving soul will be his next victim? How will the evil be expressed?
Who knows? How scary.
“Fear is based on our judgment of the threat we are experiencing,” Sparks said in a recent Purdue News Service release timed for the Halloween season. “That level can be intensified if there are unknowns about the threat, because uncertainty is an ingredient that feeds into general anxiety.”
Unknown threats and uncertainty that feed into general anxiety?
Sounds like a description of contemporary America with our brutally competitive 24/7 news cycle that is exploited by political and cultural forces in hopes of keeping the dread quotient sky-high.
Intrigued, I called Sparks in West Lafayette to hear more about his research into media-driven fear. Steeped in the subject since he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, the professor is a storehouse of fascinating information.
(By the way, when scientists like Sparks use the term “media,” they mean the word in its broadest sense, which includes all forms of mass communication such as advertising and entertainment, not just the news media.)
“Human emotion is not necessarily designed to swing rapidly from one extreme emotion to another extreme … We don’t move very well from positive-toned emotion to negative,” Sparks said. “But the media environment is really structured to move us from one emotion-toned story to another — it becomes an emotional roller coaster. It’s very draining and can also promote a sense of anxiety.”
Controlling the images and information that come at us in an omnipresent media environment, Sparks said, “is a challenge” for adults as well as children. It isn’t as easy anymore as simply turning off a TV or avoiding the latest incarnation of Freddy Krueger.
“My research with adults is very clear; almost everybody has at least one media experience that causes regret. They regret they’ve seen something, they wish they hadn’t seen it,” Sparks said. But, “once you’ve seen it, it’s too late. You can’t undo that.”
Part of Sparks’ research involves studying the physiological activity that is set in motion when we are frightened. Heart rate increases as does systolic blood pressure. Adrenaline pumps, capillaries constrict so skin temperature drops, muscles tense up, sometimes we sweat.
Significantly, most men — especially young males — pronounce these arousal sensations scary, but enjoyable and fun. The higher the level of fear evoked, the more positively they rank the experience.
“It’s almost like a tribal initiation. They’re euphoric, relieved; they made it through,” Sparks said.
Females experience the exact same physiological effects, but they dislike those feelings. Instead of “scary but fun,” they tend to experience only “scary,” a negative.
Sparks’ research also has debunked the popular belief that most adults actually like to be frightened by a media experience. (Movie reviewers seem to buy this belief, automatically. Maybe because males dominate film criticism?)
“About one-third of people say they will systematically seek out such experiences, another third systematically avoid them and one-third say it depends on the situation — who they are with and the nature of the content,” he said.
In his Halloween message for Purdue News Service, Sparks advises parents to recognize the power of scary media on their kids, and not only their youngest kids. Especially realistic portrayals, and those in which the evil force is not easily identified or depicted, can upset and frighten older children — just as they can adults.
Sparks said that in his “Theories of Mass Communication” classes for undergrads, students usually start out with the notion that “the media don’t affect us.”
“By the time they finish the course,” he added, “they have a different outlook.”
As for those who insist that frightening films, television series and graphic, disturbing news programs “are no big deal” because adults can shrug them off, Sparks refers to the cache of media regrets in his office.
“I know better,” he said. “I’ve got stacks of personal writings that detail the effects … These things have an impact on us.”
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.
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