Posted on behalf of Katrina Charles, BA Media Fellow

Researchers have discovered the ‘scaredy-cat gene’, which explains “why horror films make some people scream in terror while others may simply laugh”, says the Telegraph.

The researchers attached 96 women to electrodes to determine if they blinked when they were startled (i.e. they were exposed to a short blast of loud white noise) while being shown pictures that were either pleasant (e.g. animals, babies), neutral (e.g. power outlet, hairdryer) or unpleasant (e.g. weapons, injured victims).

“We used the startle reflex because it’s a very old evolutionary indication of anxiety. It’s not something you can manipulate or fake,” said author Dr Martin Reuter of the University of Bonn, co-author of the paper published in Behavioral Neuroscience (Independent).

The researchers found that the variation in the COMT gene, which regulates dopamine, significantly affected the startle reflex, with carriers “startled more dramatically in response to unpleasant pictures” (press release).

The Telegraph thinkgs “the findings may explain why it is that over the past 35 years people have had wildly different reactions to the classic horror film, The Exorcist.”

This gene variation, which has developed relatively recently in evolutionary terms and is not present in other primates such as chimpanzees, might also be the difference between the worriers [ie herald] and the warriors. But before you mock the worriers, it is thought that this variation may have been to our evolutionary advantage. Dr George Fieldman, Psychologist at Buckingham New University, said “possessing the variation could be beneficial from an evolutionary perspective” (BBC).

For some great B grade horror, check out the blog from our roving correspondent Emma Maris.