![]() Even when scientists recruit heavily in ghost-friendly areas (e.g., abandoned warehouses, funeral homes, or the annual convention of the Helmetless Motorcycle Riders Association), many spirits are reluctant to leave the spot where they perished, let alone travel to an academic lab. First, despite the fact that more humans have died than walk the earth today, ghosts are incredibly difficult to find and recruit as subjects. The challenges of studying ghost emotions are well-known. Even trivial questions such as “Do ghosts perceive fear?” are at an embarrassingly early stage of inquiry. Scientists still know frighteningly little about the emotions of ghosts. Regardless of which theory one subscribes to, most scientists agree that ghost emotions can be usefully mapped onto a one-dimensional circumplex along an axis ranging from “Friendly” to “Scary.” (6) Haunting Challenges 2).įigure 2: Some of the many facial configurations for Boo. In a construction mindset, an emotion such as “Boo” is not a uniform essence (e.g., a “supernatural kind”) but a broad category with great variety (Fig. Identifying those ingredients is an area of active research, but current hypotheses include light, soul, and swamp gas. The ghostly mind is said to contain basic ingredients that combine and interact in complex ways to produce supernatural phenomena, including emotions. The mystery of how and why these communities of the dead can thrive, despite the citizens’ total lack of eyes, noses, mouths, and ears, has been termed the struggle of “getting along versus getting a head.”Ī third school of thought is rooted in psychological construction (sometimes mislabeled as “other-dimensional” approaches). (5) Of particular note is evolutionary psychology’s fascination with ghosts who came into existence through decapitation: For some reason, these spirits often rise together and form large, effective social groups. ![]() Were the emotions of ghosts designed for our hominin ancestors who perished on the African savannah? Or do they extend further back, to our primate ancestors who plummeted out of trees? Some proponents trace the roots of ghost-emotion circuitry all the way back to squashed insects. (4) A search for the hypothetical “Boo circuit” is ongoing.įigure 1: A facial configuration for Boo (simulated).Ī second school of thought comes from evolutionary psychology, wherein the primary question is one of ancestry. 1) is said to be universal among ghosts, at least among those with faces. In particular, the wide-eyed, open-mouthed facial expression associated with the experience of Boo (Fig. (3) The most well-studied ghost emotion - the desire to scare (known in the literature as “Boo”) - is claimed to meet these criteria. The most well-known is the theory of basic ghost emotions, which posits three criteria: The emotion must exist from the moment of death, have a unique and spooky expression, and be found in the ghosts of other animals. In the modern day, there are several schools of thought on ghost emotions. William James, who had an interest in spiritualism, famously wrote that “ghosts do not cause us to feel fear rather, it is the experience of fear that summons ghosts to us” (later called the James-Doppelgäng Theory of Emotion). ![]() The science of ghost emotions dates back to Charles Darwin, who proposed that certain emotions were passed down from the living to the dead through evolution - indeed, his masterworks The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animus and On the Origin of Specters are undying classics in the field. Moreover, ghost-emotion research has gained much credibility within funding agencies, as it is the only field in psychology in which luminaries like Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud remain available for consultation. S.) at the Università del Purgatorio in Milan, Italy, are turning their attention to the incorporeal sciences. Emotion laboratories worldwide, most notably the newly founded Center for Research on Emotion, Ectoplasm, and Psychological Science (C. But what do ghosts themselves feel? Are they sad that they died? Do they enjoy scaring us? The field of ghost emotions (also known as “adfectuspirituality” or “psychological heebiejeebism”) is arguably one of the fastest growing disciplines in psychology today. It is widely known and accepted that people are afraid of ghosts. ![]()
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