Don't ever fuck with psychologists

Fear is the mind-killer...

In 1998 at a high school in Tennessee, a teacher complained of a pungent “gasoline-like” smell in her classroom. Soon after, she fell ill, reporting symptoms such as nausea, shortness of breath, dizziness and a headache. Almost immediately several students in her class started to experience similar symptoms and, before long, the rest of the school was stricken.

The building was evacuated as Fire fighters, ambulances and police arrived on the scene to tend to the sick. That evening the local emergency room admitted 80 students and 19 staff members; 38 were hospitalised overnight.

But what was the mysterious toxic gas that sparked the outbreak? Several extensive investigations by Government agencies found nothing. Blood tests showed no signs of any harmful compounds. Instead, according to Timothy Jones a local epidemiologist, the fear of being poisoned had spread, fuelling the symptoms experienced by everyone inside.

A report in the New England Journal of Medicine attributed the outbreak to a phenomenon known as ‘mass psychogenic illness’, which occurs when the fear of infection spreads just as virulently as the disease itself. The students and staff had decided that, based on the behaviour of those around them, there was a real threat they needed to be afraid of.

It would have been nice to know why the teacher got sick though !

Dr Emily Holmes [is] a clinical psychologist at Oxford University who uses a selection of film clips to scare people in the lab. Holmes’s research simulates the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by using moments from films scary enough to invoke flashbacks in the viewer later – a hallmark symptom of the disorder.

“There are a lot of individual differences in what scares people. We want our clips to be so fearful that they intrude into your consciousness when you don’t want them to... we’re trying to create a fear response that persists long after the viewing to simulate the effects of PTSD. The most effective clips were those that were very disturbing or showed some kind of terrible event that was impossible to stop."

In fact, Cantor’s participants were so affected by these films that many of them lost sleep and developed phobias long after the film. But why is it that we can’t tell the difference between a real threat and a fake one?

“The amygdala doesn’t control what we think, but rather our instinctive bodily reaction to an event,” says Cantor. “It evolved so that when we came across something threatening, regardless of whether it’s real or not, it reacts. Your memory in the hippocampus then makes an association to what you felt when you first encountered that event.”

Unfortunately the more highly evolved part of the brain, the forebrain, finds it difficult to override the reaction of the amygdala to tell us that there’s nothing to be afraid of. “It’s hard for our conscious mind to damp down our physiological reactions,” says Cantor. “For example, people who had an adverse reaction to Jaws not only find themselves scared of going into the ocean, but also find themselves afraid to go into lakes and pools, even though they know there’s no possibility of finding a shark in either. The same is true for depictions of the supernatural in films; we’re afraid of something with such power that it’s beyond our ability to control, and our conscious mind can’t reverse that.”

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