A new psychology study published in Cognition and Emotion argues that horror is not simply an intensified version of fear but a distinct emotional reaction to events that defy our basic assumptions about how the world works. The research, led by Pamela Marie Taylor, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Global Connectivity at Akita International University, examines how the severity of harm and the vividness of language shape whether people label their response as horror rather than fear.
“Horror is one of dozens of English words we have to label our emotional responses to harm, but it remains largely unstudied,” Taylor told PsyPost. “This neglect might be because research in the 1980s categorized horror as a subtype of fear, or because it has become closely associated with the fictional genre of horror films. However, people use the word ‘horror’ to describe their responses to real events, and do so in a way that is meaningfully different from how they use the word ‘fear’.”
In psychology, horror can represent a different interpretation of harmful events: fear operates as a threat-detection system that signals potential danger and motivates defence or escape, while horror may reflect an emotional and mental shock experienced when witnessing or learning about harm that contradicts one’s basic assumptions about safety and how the world operates.
To test whether horror can be differentiated from fear by how abnormal the harm seems, Taylor designed two experiments that teased apart the roles of harm severity and graphic language. She defined graphicness through a distinction between abstract and concrete language, reasoning that abstract statements like “a person was murdered” fit into familiar mental categories, whereas concrete descriptions such as “a camper was slaughtered by his friend who sliced into his chest with a rusty axe” are harder to square with normal expectations.
The study also sought to determine whether horror stems from abnormality or simply from higher arousal. If horror were merely an amplified fear response driven by physical activation, arousal should account for much of the difference between horror and fear.
In the first study, 60 adult native English speakers in the United States participated via Prolific. The average age was 35.5 years, with participants aged 21 to 69; the sample was 70 percent female and 71.1 percent White. Each participant read four real-sounding news headlines adapted from The Daily Mail describing a person being harmed, with headlines displayed for seven seconds before rating questions appeared.
The headlines varied along two dimensions: harm severity (moderate injuries that heal versus extreme harm such as death) and graphicness (abstract versus concrete descriptions). After each headline, participants rated the perceived abnormality of the harm on a 5-point scale using four items assessing how unusual, abnormal or unheard-of the event seemed. They also rated their emotional reactions on the same scale, with “horrified” and “shocked” combined to measure horror, and “scared” and “afraid” combined to measure fear. A separate five-point scale assessed physical arousal using illustrated figures ranging from a calm, closed-eyed figure to a wide-eyed figure with jagged lines indicating activation.
Across the study, the average abnormality rating was 3.40 on the 5-point scale. Shifting from moderate to extreme harm increased perceived abnormality by 0.89 points, and shifting from abstract to concrete language increased it by 0.88 points.
Both harm severity and graphicness boosted horror more than fear. Overall, participants’ average emotion rating was 2.69, with horror averaging 0.98 points higher than fear. Extreme harm boosted horror by 1.09 points compared with a 0.45-point rise for fear, and concrete descriptions raised horror by 0.70 points versus a 0.22-point increase for fear.
Perceived abnormality played a substantial mediating role. It accounted for 39 percent of the total effect of harm severity on horror and 76 percent of the effect of graphic language on horror, while explaining 63 percent and 83 percent of why severity and graphicness increased horror more than fear. In one model, the impact of graphic language on horror relative to fear was no longer statistically significant once arousal was taken into account, and when arousal and abnormality were modelled as parallel pathways, both explained part of the shift toward horror.
To verify the pattern beyond a single sample, Taylor conducted a second study with another 60 adult native English speakers, again recruited via Prolific. The second cohort had an average age of 42.57 years (range 21 to 75) and was 70 percent female, 30 percent male, and 75 percent White. The procedure and rating scales mirrored the first study, except that one headline involving an animal attack was replaced with an interpersonal assault so all headlines depicted one person harming another.
Study 2 closely mirrored Study 1’s core findings regarding abnormality and horror. The average abnormality rating stood at 3.42; extreme harm raised abnormality by 0.85 points and concrete descriptions by 0.89 points. Horror rose by 1.01 points with extreme harm, compared with a 0.39-point increase for fear, meaning the effect on horror was more than 2.5 times larger. Concrete descriptions increased horror by 0.62 points versus 0.14 points for fear.
Unlike the first experiment, general perceptions of bodily harm in Study 2 showed a stronger link with horror than fear, though the researcher noted that in both studies a minority of participants (12 percent in Study 1 and 22 percent in Study 2) gave identical harmfulness ratings across all four headlines, which limited precision for that measure.
A notable divergence in Study 2 was the role of arousal. When tested alone, arousal helped explain the shift toward horror, but once abnormality was added to the model, the arousal pathway ceased to be statistically significant, with indirect effects of 0.11 for harm severity and 0.06 for graphicness. By contrast, perceived abnormality remained a robust pathway in both studies, even after controlling for self-reported bodily activation. Taylor argues that whereas fear tends to arise from uncertainty about potential danger, horror results from an excess of concrete information about severe harm that clashes with a person’s sense of a safe world.
For everyday news readers, the findings suggest subtle wording choices can alter emotional impact. “When the same harmful event in a news headline was described using concrete language, it was rated as more abnormal than when it was described using abstract language, and caused an increase in horror that was three-to-four times greater than the increase in fear,” Taylor noted. “In other words, a person’s emotional reaction to a news event is influenced by the language with which it is told.”
Taylor also highlighted practical implications for how online rhetoric shapes discourse. “In terms of practical significance, it seems that a lot of online and political rhetoric uses abnormality to capture attention, shape discourse and influence interpretations,” she said. “Therefore, people should be aware of how their emotional responses to events can be shaped by how events are described. We are increasingly aware of the dangers of online misinformation, but that focuses on the factuality of what is described. These results indicate that even in factually accurate descriptions, the language with which the event is described can influence our perception of how normal or abnormal it is, and consequently our emotional response to it.”
Taylor added: “We would not argue that using concrete language is bad or that headlines that use it are necessarily manipulative. The current findings examined how concrete and abstract language elicit different emotional responses without investigating the appropriateness of the language. Another way to read this study’s findings is that describing harm with abstract language can normalize it, which also has consequences when reporting on harmful events.”
Several caveats accompany the results. Concrete headlines are longer due to the inclusion of vivid sensory details, so word count could contribute to the impact of graphic descriptions. The experiments used short tabloid headlines about harm to strangers in everyday settings, with no non-harmful baseline condition. It remains an open question whether severe harm in high-risk settings would feel less abnormal and elicit less horror.
Perceived abnormality was measured rather than manipulated, and the analyses testing it as a pathway were exploratory, added after the main results. The horror measure combined “horrified” with “shocked,” a pairing that may overlap with judging an event as unusual. Both studies used similar headlines and two-item emotion scales, so the findings may not generalise to other materials or measures.
Methodologically, participants rated perceived abnormality, arousal and their emotions immediately after each headline, so the study cannot establish a strict chronological sequence. Arousal was assessed with a single visual self-report scale rather than physiological measures such as heart rate or skin conductance.
The samples were 70 percent female and restricted to native English speakers in the United States. Taylor notes that not all languages distinguish horror and fear in everyday usage, suggesting future research could explore whether horror is a culturally specific concept.
“I’m interested in investigating whether feelings of horror play a role in conspiratorial thinking,” Taylor said. “For example, can conspiracy theories act as a form of emotion regulation that people use to turn the helplessness of horror into anger, with the latter associated with a greater sense of control?”
The study, Gruesome Details: Graphic Descriptions and Extreme Harm Differentially Elicit Horror (vs Fear) via Increased Perceptions of Abnormality, was authored by Pamela Marie Taylor.
