People with elevated psychopathic traits tend to find frightening scenes less distressing and more exciting than other people do, according to a new study published in Psychological Reports. The findings suggest that a heightened belief in one’s own invincibility helps explain why these individuals feel less afraid when watching scary footage, while a tendency to become easily bored does not appear to explain why they find it enjoyable.
Psychopathy is a personality profile characterized by two distinct sets of traits. The first dimension involves interpersonal and emotional features, such as superficial charm, manipulation, and a lack of empathy or guilt. The second dimension encompasses an impulsive lifestyle, sensation-seeking, and antisocial behavior. Early psychological theories proposed that individuals high in these traits take reckless risks simply because they have a fundamental deficit in the ability to feel fear.
More recent work has challenged the notion that psychopathic individuals are completely incapable of experiencing fear. While these individuals often show muted physical reactions to threat, a 2016 meta-analysis found little evidence that they lack the conscious, subjective feeling of fear. Psychological theories of emotion note that fear and excitement share nearly identical physical symptoms, such as a racing heart, meaning that how a person experiences a high-stakes moment depends heavily on how their mind interprets that physical arousal.
Building on this distinction, members of the team behind the new study developed the Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis, which proposes that people with psychopathic traits actually interpret frightening situations as pleasurable. Experiencing fear as enjoyable requires two simultaneous reactions: a dampened negative response, such as feeling less panicked, and a heightened positive response, such as feeling exhilarated.
In a 2020 experimental study by the same group, participants with higher psychopathy scores watched scary video game footage and reported fewer negative emotions and stronger positive emotions than their peers, and a 2026 study covered by PsyPost found that individuals higher in psychopathic traits interpret an elevated heart rate during scary moments as pleasurable excitement rather than distress.
What remains uncertain is why people with psychopathic traits evaluate threatening situations so positively. One possibility draws on horror filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s observation that audiences can enjoy suspense when they feel safe from actual threat. Psychopathic individuals may possess a strong sense of invincibility, defined as the belief that one is immune to danger and personal harm, which could make frightening scenarios feel safe enough to enjoy, much like riding a roller coaster.
Another possibility is boredom proneness, the tendency to become bored easily, which has been tied to sensation-seeking and was linked to sadistic behavior and bullying in research covered by PsyPost in 2023, and which might drive individuals with psychopathic traits to seek out fear for an emotional rush. To test whether invincibility and boredom proneness help explain the link between psychopathy and fear enjoyment, study author Angela Book, a professor and director of the forensic psychology and criminal justice program at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, and her colleagues conducted two studies.
“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,” Book told PsyPost. “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.”
In the first study, the researchers recruited 825 participants across two distinct groups to test the role of invincibility. The first group consisted of 425 undergraduate students from two Canadian universities, who had an average age of about 21 years and were predominantly female (75 percent). The second group included 400 adults from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdworking platform, who had an average age of about 38 years and were mostly male (59 percent).
All participants completed the 64-item Self-Report Psychopathy Scale, rating their agreement with statements such as “People sometimes say that I’m cold-hearted” on a five-point scale. They also completed the Invincibility Belief Index, which presents 20 hypothetical scenarios, such as being confronted by a vicious, angry dog, and asks respondents to rate the probability from 0 percent to 100 percent that they would escape unharmed.
Next, participants watched two three-minute first-person video clips in random order: a SeaWorld roller coaster ride designed to induce excitement, and a suspenseful sequence from the horror video game Outlast designed to induce fear. After each clip, participants rated how strongly they felt nine negative fear-related words, including “alarmed” and “panicked,” and nine positive excitement-related words, including “exhilarated” and “delighted,” on a scale from 1 to 5.
Across the combined sample, participants rated the roller coaster clip as more positive and less negative than the horror game clip, confirming that the videos triggered the intended emotions. Compared to the university students, the online adult group scored higher on perceived invincibility (averaging 6.08 versus 5.68 on an 11-point scale) and rated the horror video more positively (averaging 26.30 versus 24.36 out of a possible 45) and less negatively (averaging 28.99 versus 31.49 out of 45). Although statistical tests indicated that neither age nor biological sex altered the underlying links between personality traits and emotional reactions, the authors analyzed the student and adult groups separately to account for these baseline differences.
To evaluate why psychopathy relates to fear enjoyment, the researchers used mediation analysis, a statistical technique that tests whether an intermediate factor accounts for the connection between two variables. The analyses predicting negative reactions controlled for positive reactions, and vice versa.
In both groups, higher psychopathy scores were linked to a stronger sense of invincibility, which statistically accounted for the link between psychopathic traits and lower negative emotion during the scary clip. In the student sample, the direct link between psychopathy and reduced fear was no longer statistically significant once invincibility was considered; in the online sample, that link had not been statistically significant to begin with. By contrast, invincibility did not explain why participants with higher psychopathy scores reported heightened excitement during the horror clip.
The links were modest. Correlations between psychopathy scores and positive reactions to the horror clip were about 0.26 to 0.32, while the correlations with reduced negative reactions were about 0.07 to 0.10. On the usual scale, about 0.1 is small, 0.3 medium, and 0.5 large.
Because feeling invincible appeared to explain why individuals with psychopathic traits were unbothered by threat, but not why they found it actively thrilling, the researchers conducted a second study examining boredom proneness. They recruited a new sample of 425 undergraduate students from two Canadian universities, with an average age of 21 years and a majority of women (74 percent). These participants followed the exact same procedure as the first study, with the addition of the Boredom Proneness Scale, in which they rated items such as getting restless while waiting in line on a seven-point scale.
Across the sample, participants averaged 22.94 out of 45 on positive ratings of the horror clip and 29.99 on negative ratings. Psychopathic traits were positively correlated with both boredom proneness and a sense of invincibility (correlations of about 0.3), as well as with more positive and less negative ratings of the horror clip (correlations of about 0.2).
When both potential explanatory factors were tested together in a mediation model, invincibility again partially accounted for the link between higher psychopathy scores and reduced negative fear responses, and unexpectedly also partially accounted for the positive excitement response, though both effects were small and statistically borderline. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the indirect pathway linking psychopathic traits to heightened positive reactions through boredom proneness was not statistically significant.
“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,” Book explained. “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 researchers also broke the psychopathy scores down into the two main trait dimensions. Both were linked to fear enjoyment, though results for the impulsive-antisocial traits were less consistent, particularly in the online sample. In the second study, accounting for boredom proneness made their link to enjoying the scary clip stronger rather than weaker, a result the authors say may be a statistical fluke. Overall, the findings align with a study covered by PsyPost in 2024, which similarly found that higher psychopathic traits, especially interpersonal and emotional features, were associated with more positive and fewer negative reactions to scary video clips.
“The relationship between psychopathic traits and fear enjoyment is of medium size, which is a relatively large effect in psychological research,” Book noted. “It has been found in multiple studies by multiple researchers and appears to be fairly robust.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these results. Because the studies measured personality traits and emotional reactions at a single point in time using self-report questionnaires, the data cannot establish that feeling invincible directly causes people to feel less fear. The researchers also did not publicly record their predictions before collecting data. In addition, the participants were university students and online workers rather than clinical patients or incarcerated offenders, meaning the findings reflect variations in psychopathic personality traits within the general population rather than a diagnosed personality disorder.
Another point to keep in mind is that the frightening stimulus was a three-minute video game clip rather than a real-life physical danger. Previous neurological research suggests that individuals high in psychopathic traits often fail to notice subtle threat cues in their environment, so their reduced distress might reflect inattention to danger rather than a conscious belief that they are invincible. Because boredom proneness failed to explain why scary situations feel exciting to people with elevated psychopathic traits, the authors suggest that future studies should investigate the brain’s dopamine-driven reward system, as the anticipation of a high-stakes situation may itself act as a powerful reward for these individuals.
Looking ahead, the researchers plan to test how people with elevated psychopathic traits respond to more immersive threats that go beyond standard video clips. “Our next step will be to use virtual reality horror games/scenarios to look at the relationship in more realistic situations,” Book said.
The study, “Psychopathy and Fear Enjoyment: The Role of Invincibility and Boredom Proneness,” was authored by Angela Book, Beth Visser, Tori Wattam, and Kirkland Johnston.
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