Haunted attraction: The effects of recreational fear on interpersonal bonding

Recreational fear experiences, such as haunted attractions, paradoxically attract millions of patrons annually; despite fear being a generally negative emotion, people will pay money to experience it. Some have stipulated that part of the appeal is interpersonal-anecdotally, such experiences appear to bring people closer together. We put this idea to the test in five studies conducted at three commercial haunted attractions. In Studies 1-4, feeling more fear and making physical contact with other attraction guests were strong predictors of perceiving that the experience brought participants closer together. However, we consistently observed tiny or null results when measuring pre-to-post changes in participants' interpersonal closeness ratings (Studies 2 and 4), highlighting the nuanced nature of these relational dynamics. To further investigate these complexities, we employed a final qualitative interview study (Study 5), which found that postexperience processing (time to talk about the experience before quantifying one's feelings) may be critical to bonding. These findings suggest that while fear reliably fosters a subjective sense of connection, its relational impact may depend on how the experience is processed and contextualized. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).