After all, laughter is not the best medicine. On the contrary. If you don’t know how to occupy your time, a haunted house is a better option than a comedic movie.
A hyperventilation It stimulates the nervous system in a similar way to fear, and reduces inflammation.
This took Marc Andersenfrom Aarhus University, Denmark, and his fellow authors of what will be published in the January issue of Brain, Behavior, and Immunity a wondering if fear would have the same effect.
To find out, the team looked at 113 people who spent an hour in a haunted house attraction in the city of Vejle, Denmark. They took blood from the participants before and after walking through the house’s 50 rooms, which were full of clowns, zombies and monsters with pig masks that wielded chainsaws.
Researchers also collected blood samples three days later, focusing on the 22 participants who had slightly elevated inflammation.
Inflammation was measured by levels of a marker called C-reactive protein (CRP) before participants entered the haunted house. and a surprise happened: three days after the visit, 18 of these participants had significantly reduced CRP levels.
“We know that chronic low-grade inflammation is unhealthy,” so reducing it could bring benefitssays Andersen to .
“I would hesitate to say that if we watch horror films we can extend our lifespan”, he says Eric Shattuck, from Florida State University in Tallahassee. “However, social stimuli that evoke terror, such as horror films, can temporarily decrease inflammation.”he guarantees.
Even though being scared is more about adrenalinethe researcher guarantees that some people’s taste for horror can also be linked to the benefits now revealed.
Although the inflammation has been linked to many health problemsincluding heart disease and dementia, is also a vital part of the immune response, which is why it is not advised to completely reduce its levels.
“We don’t want to deregulate inflammation to the point of making it less effective in helping us fight infections. That said, I wonder how reasonable this would be; the immune system is quite resilient,” says Shattuck.
