The 2022 Insect Fear Festival is coming. Run! Jump! Fly! One way or another or another, get to it on Saturday, February 26, 2022! The festival is organized by swarms of entomologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year it begins with a special presentation by Ig Nobel Prize winner Justin Schmidt, creator of […]
Neil Martin scared up a bunch of psychological research about how people respond to scary movies: “(Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empirical Research on Psychological Responses to Horror Films,” G. Neil Martin, Frontiers in Psychology, epub 2019. The author, at Regent’s University London, UK, explains: “Despite a century of horror […]
What power over the minds of humans lurks in bug-human-hybrid superhero movies? One study, at least, asks that question. The study is: ” ‘Spidey Can’: Preliminary Evidence Showing Arachnophobia Symptom Reduction Due to Superhero Movie Exposure,” Yaakov S.G. Hoffman, Shani Pitcho-Prelorentzos, Lia Ring, and Menachem Ben-Ezra, Frontiers in Psychiatry, epub 2019. The authors, at Bar-Ilan […]
As international politics comes to resemble the over-imaginative plotlines of James Bond movies, some research publications choose to look more closely at the details of those movies. This new study looks at smoking: “James Bond’s Smoking Over Six Decades,” Nick Wilson and Anne Tucker, Tobacco Control, epub January 16, 2017. The authors, at the University of Otago, New […]