The Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis: Psychopathic Traits and Invincibility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The main objective of this study was to examine whether invincibility mediates the relationship between psychopathic traits and fear enjoyment. Brock University undergraduate student participants (N = 81) viewed either a neutral video or a video intended to decrease feelings of invincibility and then played a horror game in Virtual Reality. Participants rated the videogame on a list of adjectives which captured fear and exciting affective appraisals. As expected, psychopathic traits were associated with lower fear scores and higher excitement scores. The video condition was not a significant predictor of mediation in the initial model. However, in the control condition the relationship between psychopathy and fear enjoyment was replicated, when each condition was examined separately. More specifically, psychopathic traits were related to a less negative and more positive perception of their emotional state. When participants’ feelings of invincibility were manipulated, this relationship was no longer significant suggesting that feelings of invincibility may be important in being able to enjoy fear-inducing stimuli. These findings align with the Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis (FEH). Future research could investigate invincibility as a mediator with a larger sample size.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".