An international team of researchers has found that people with elevated psychopathic traits are more likely to interpret frightening scenes as enjoyable rather than distressing, with a belief in personal invincibility helping to explain the diminished fear. The findings come from two new studies examining why fear can be experienced as a source of excitement for some individuals.
Psychopathy is typically described as a two‑dimensional personality profile. One dimension covers interpersonal and emotional features such as superficial charm, manipulation, and a lack of empathy or guilt. The other encompasses an impulsive lifestyle, sensation‑seeking and antisocial behaviour. While early theories posited that those high in these traits feel fear less, more recent work has challenged the notion of a complete fear deficit and emphasised how fear and excitement share similar physical signs, such as a racing heart, making interpretation key to how a person experiences high‑stakes moments.
Building on this understanding, the researchers proposed the Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis: individuals with psychopathic traits may interpret frightening situations as pleasurable, requiring both a dampened negative response and a heightened positive response to feel fear as enjoyable.
Previous work by the same team suggested that people with higher psychopathy scores report fewer negative emotions and stronger positive emotions when watching scary footage, while later findings indicated they interpret an elevated heart rate during scary moments as pleasurable excitement rather than distress. The current work seeks to clarify why fear might be enjoyed by those with elevated psychopathic traits.
As one of the study’s authors, Angela Book of Brock University, explained: “Much of the research on psychopaths and fear has focused on a deficit in feeling fear, but we didn’t think this told the whole story. Instead, we thought that people with psychopathic traits likely feel something, but maybe it is different from other people. More specifically, we think they actually enjoy fear-inducing situations. This particular study tried to examine why they might enjoy fear.”
The researchers conducted two studies to probe the roles of invincibility and boredom proneness in fear enjoyment. In the first, they recruited 825 participants across two groups: 425 undergraduate students from two Canadian universities and 400 adults from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom recruited online via a crowdworking platform.Participants completed the 64‑item Self‑Report Psychopathy Scale and the Invincibility Belief Index, rating how likely they would escape unharmed in 20 hypothetical scenarios, on an 0–100 scale.
Participants then watched two three‑minute first‑person clips in random order: a SeaWorld roller coaster ride designed to evoke excitement and a suspenseful sequence from the horror game Outlast designed to induce fear. After each clip they rated, on a five‑point scale, nine negative fear words such as “alarmed” and “panicked” and nine positive excitement words such as “exhilarated” and “delighted.”
Across the combined sample, the roller coaster clip was judged more positive and less negative than the horror clip, confirming the clips triggered distinct emotional responses. The online adult group scored higher on perceived invincibility and rated the horror clip more positively and less negatively than the student group.
In mediation analyses, higher psychopathy scores were linked to a stronger sense of invincibility, which statistically accounted for the link between psychopathic traits and reduced negative emotion during the scary clip. In the student sample, the direct link between psychopathy and reduced fear vanished once invincibility was considered; in the online sample, the direct link was not significant to begin with. Invincibility did not explain why participants with higher psychopathy scores reported greater excitement for the horror clip.
The researchers reported modest effect sizes: correlations between psychopathy and positive reactions to the horror clip ranged from about 0.26 to 0.32, while correlations with reduced negative reactions were around 0.07 to 0.10. On conventional scales, these are generally small to medium effects.
To explore boredom proneness as an alternative explanation, a second study recruited 425 undergraduate students from two Canadian universities and repeated the same procedure, adding the Boredom Proneness Scale. The sample averaged about 21 years of age with a majority of female participants.
In this second study, psychopathic traits correlated with both boredom proneness and invincibility (roughly 0.3), and with more positive and less negative responses to the horror clip (roughly 0.2). When both invincibility and boredom proneness were included in a mediation model, invincibility again partially explained the link between higher psychopathy scores and reduced negative fear responses, and unexpectedly also partially accounted for the heightened positive reaction. However, the authors note that both effects were small and of borderline statistical significance; the indirect path through boredom proneness to greater fear enjoyment did not reach significance.
Book commented on the dual findings: “First, we did find that people with psychopathic traits not only have less of a negative response to fear-inducing situations, they also have a larger positive reaction. Essentially, they enjoy fear. Importantly, this appears to be due to a sense of invincibility. As Alfred Hitchcock famously pointed out, we only enjoy fear when we don’t feel like we are in danger.”
The analyses also examined the two main trait dimensions of psychopathy. Both dimensions were linked to fear enjoyment, though the impulsive‑antisocial traits produced less consistent results, particularly in the online sample. In the second study, accounting for boredom proneness strengthened their link to enjoying the scary clip rather than weakening it, a finding the authors describe as potentially a statistical fluke.
The researchers note that their results align with a 2024 PsyPost‑covered study suggesting that higher psychopathic traits, particularly the interpersonal and emotional features, are associated with more positive and fewer negative reactions to scary video clips. Book emphasised that the relationship between psychopathic traits and fear enjoyment is of a medium size, “which is a relatively large effect in psychological research,” and appears to be fairly robust across studies.
As with all research, there are caveats. The studies relied on cross‑sectional self‑report measures, so they cannot prove causation between invincibility and reduced fear. Participants were university students and online workers rather than clinical patients or offenders, meaning the findings reflect traits within the general population rather than a diagnosed disorder. The frightening stimulus was a three‑minute video game clip, not real‑world danger, inviting caution in extrapolating to live threats.
The authors acknowledge that inattention to threat cues may partly explain reduced distress, and they suggest future work examine the brain’s dopamine‑driven reward system to understand how anticipation of high‑stakes situations might act as a reward for those with elevated psychopathic traits. They also plan to test more immersive threats using virtual reality scenarios to see if the effects persist in more realistic settings.
The study, titled Psychopathy and Fear Enjoyment: The Role of Invincibility and Boredom Proneness, is authored by Angela Book, Beth Visser, Tori Wattam and Kirkland Johnston.
