On the Consumption of Negative Feelings

Abstract

How can the hedonistic assumption (i.e., people's willingness to pursue pleasure and avoid pain) be reconciled with people choosing to expose themselves to experiences known to elicit negative feelings? We assess how (1) the intensity of the negative feelings, (2) positive feelings in the aftermath, and (3) the coactivation of positive and negative feelings contribute to our understanding of such behavior. In a series of four studies, consumers with either approach or avoidance tendencies (toward horror movies) were asked to report their positive and/or negative feelings either after (experiment 1) or while (experiments 2, 3A, and 3B) they were exposed to a horror movie. We demonstrate how a model incorporating coactivation principles and enriched with a protective frame moderator (via detachment) can provide a more parsimonious and viable description of the affective reactions that result from counterhedonic behavior.R eaders who are unfamiliar with the vastly popular (in some circles!) horror movie genre might have missed the following scene. Two men wake up in a filthy bathroom chained to massive steel pipes at opposite ends of the room. The blood between them is from a man's corpse still holding the gun he used to kill himself. The two men discover two hacksaws. The tools are too dull to cut the massive chains that keep the men imprisoned but seem sharp enough to hack off their limbs and set them free. Jigsaw, the wildly popular killer, graphically tantalizes his prey. One victim must crawl through razor wire to escape. Another must find a key to overturn a bear trap attached to his mouth. Suggestively titled Saw, the movie generated $18 million in box office receipts in its opening weekend in October 2004, hitting third place in U.S. box office ratings (behind only Ray and The Grudge, another horror movie). Saw II was released 1 year later. Gainesville, FL, 32611-7155 (joel.cohen@cba.ufl.edu). Address correspondence to Eduardo B. Andrade. This project was sponsored by the Junior Faculty Research Grant and the Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab) at the University of California, Berkeley. The article benefited from helpful comments and insights from the editor, the associate editor, and three reviewers, and also from participants in seminars at Stanford University, New York University, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the Emotion and Decision Making Reunion at the University of California, Berkeley. The authors thank James Chong, Cindy Wang, Simon Mak, Lawrence Sweet, Debbie Atlas, and Brenda Naputi for their assistance with data collection. John Deighton served as editor and Baba Shiv served as associate editor for this article.Electronically published June 26, 2007 These and a number of other box office hits attract audiences by immersing them in nearly 2 hours of fear, disgust, terror, and depravity. For that reason, horror movies provide an excellent window into counterintuitive consumer preferences for emotional experiences that produce negative emotional responses. Theor...

Seeking Pleasure and Seeking Pain: Differences in Prohedonic and Contra-Hedonic Motivation From Adolescence to Old Age

“…Andrade and Cohen (2007), for instance, demonstrated that students who liked to expose themselves to horror movies were more likely to experience both fear and happiness while watching such movies, whereas those who usually avoided horror movies were more likely to experience only fear.…”

Media Entertainment as a Result of Recreation and Psychological Growth

“…Akin to hedonic reversals and pleasurable "mind-over-body realizations" in the context of painful food-intake (Rozin, 2000, p. 980), media users may take pleasure in many innate or highly automatic body sensations, which are actually painful or distressing (e.g., Andrade & Cohen, 2007;de Wied, Zillmann, & Ordman, 1994). Horror movies provide one such example.…”

“…For example, males may enjoy horror movies more than females as they feel more protected and more capable of withstanding induced fear. Research by Andrade and Cohen (2007) suggests that such a "protective frame-of-mind" indeed moderates the impact of fear-inducing horror movies on enjoyment.…”

“…Pleasure may outweigh aversive sensations throughout an exposure period, as users reappraise directly aversive sensations as something positive (Andrade & Cohen, 2007). In contrast, aversive sensations may dominate throughout the exposure period (without much positive reappraisal), yet intense states of pleasure, typically at the end of exposure, allow the overall experience to be framed as enjoyable (Zillmann, 2006).…”

Corpses, Maggots, Poodles and Rats: Emotional Selection Operating in Three Phases of Cultural Transmission of Urban Legends

“…Finally, with respect to the choose-to-receive phase there is certainly lots of evidence that many people seek out opportunities to experience negative emotions under certain circumstances in which cognitions indicate there is no real threat, such as roller coasters and horror movies (Rozin, Haidt and McCauley, 2008b). The appeal of fear and disgust within the horror genre has long been the subject of theorizing grounded in psychoanalysis (Schneider, 2004;Fahy 2010), but there is also a recent experimental literature investigating when and why people consume negative emotions such as disgust (Andrade and Cohen, 2007;Tamir, 2009). Nonetheless, no prior research explicitly tests whether preferences to seek out disgusting stories are sufficiently general to act as a force of cultural selection of stories.…”