In the tradition of film director Alfred Hitchcock, these researchers watched the way fearful people watched their surroundings whilst walking in fear: “Visual Exploration during Locomotion Limited by Fear of Heights,” Günter Kugler, Doreen Huppert, Maria Eckl, Erich Schneider, Thomas Brandt [pictured here], PLoS ONE, 9(8), 2014, e105906. The authors, at the University of Munich and Brandenburg […]
Tag: fear
Fear of flying (amongst pilots)
Although there are a good number of academic papers which examine ‘fear of flying’, [recent example] the number of scholarly dissertations which cover ‘fear of flying’ amongst a specific subset of air travellers – viz. pilots – is very low. Perhaps just one. May we recommend the work of aviation practitioner, aviation historian, aviation philosopher, […]
The scariness of spiders to people scared of spiders
Here is one way to measure people’s fear of spiders. Post flyers seeking individuals who are very afraid of spiders, and who are willing to be paid a small amount of cash to participate in a research project, said project turning out to be the repeated answering of survey questions before and during the following activities: 1 approaching […]
Research on kids’ indifference to, or fear of, Santa Claus
Professor John Trinkaus did several studies documenting the prevalence of indifference or fear among kids visiting Santa Claus in a shopping mall, we remind you. Professor Trinkaus was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him (such as: What […]