Reading news about cruel tragedies can cause a nauseating shock that feels quite different from anxiety about a personal threat. A new study published in the journal Cognition and Emotion showed that when descriptions of harm contain extreme outcomes or vivid bloody details, they intensify specifically horror rather than fear - partly because the event seems more anomalous.
In psychology, fear and horror are often considered the same thing, but researchers distinguish between them. Fear is a threat-detection system that warns of danger and prompts self-protection or flight. Horror is defined as an emotional shock upon encountering real harm that contradicts a person's basic ideas about safety and the way the world works.
The author of the work, Pamela Marie Taylor of Akita University in Japan, notes that horror has hardly been studied, possibly because it was classified as a subtype of fear or associated with the horror film genre. However, people use the word "horror" to describe reactions to real events differently from the word "fear." For example, "I was horrified to learn" indicates a reaction to something extremely unusual, whereas "to be afraid" usually means anticipating a possible threat.
In 2022, Taylor and a colleague already showed that people experience more fear in the face of ordinary, moderate or personally significant threats, but more horror in the face of extreme or anomalous harm, even if the victims are strangers. The new study separated two factors: the severity of the harm and the imagery of the description.
The first experiment involved 60 adult native English speakers from the United States (mean age 35.5 years, 70% women, 71.1% white). They read four headlines purportedly from the news describing harm to a person. Severity ranged from moderate injuries to death, and the language ranged from abstract ("a person was killed") to concrete with bloody details ("a tourist was hacked to death by a friend with a rusty axe"). After each headline, participants rated the anomalousness of the event, their emotions (horror and fear) and physical arousal - the level of activation of the nervous system.
The results showed that both extreme harm and concrete descriptions increased perceived anomalousness (on average by 0.89 and 0.88 points on a 5-point scale, respectively). Both factors intensified horror far more than fear. For example, extreme harm increased horror by 1.09 points, but fear by only 0.45; concrete descriptions by 0.70 and 0.22, respectively. Perceived anomalousness explained 39% of the effect of severity on horror and 76% of the effect of imagery, as well as 63% and 83% of why these factors intensified horror more than fear.
In the second experiment with another 60 participants (mean age 42.57 years, 70% women, 75% white), the main results were confirmed. Extreme harm increased horror by 1.01 points versus 0.39 for fear, and concrete descriptions by 0.62 versus 0.14. However, the role of physical arousal proved less stable: after accounting for anomalousness, it ceased to be significant.
Taylor concludes that fear arises from uncertainty about a possible danger, while horror arises from an excess of concrete information about serious harm that is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a safe world. "The emotional reaction to a news item depends on the language in which it is told," she emphasizes. According to her, even factually accurate descriptions can influence the perception of the normality of an event and the reader's emotions.
The study has limitations: the concrete headlines were longer than the abstract ones, which could have influenced the result; participants rated anomalousness and emotions simultaneously, so a strict sequence cannot be established; the samples were 70% female and only from the United States. In addition, not all languages denote horror and fear with different words, so the question of the cultural specificity of the emotion remains open.