Tag: psychology

John R. Friedeberg Seeley, tragic hero of mental health

John R. Friedeberg Seeley, tragic hero of mental health

July 29, 2020

Jack Seeley was a tragic figure in North American history. His noble quest during WWII and the early postwar period to bring mental health to the masses straddled both sides of the border. He was the principal architect of the first major mental health programs in Canadian schools, a history that is now so relevant. He was also a scholar working in the fields of sociology and psychoanalysis whose collaboration was valued by important American thinkers like Erving Goffman, David Riesman and Bruno Bettleheim. His book, Crestwood Heights is a classic of the 1950s “pop sociology” genre.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: An embodied film experience

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: An embodied film experience

October 31, 2019

This is a guest post by Maarten Coëgnarts, author of Film as Embodied Art: Bodily Meaning in the Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, now available for purchase and Open Access.

When Halloween season comes around, we love to revisit the suspenseful horror classics that we know and love, and for a lot of people that is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Like many of his other films, The Shining received mixed reviews upon its initial release. Today, four decades later, the film is considered to be one of Kubrick’s finest and one of the greatest horror films ever made.

The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out

The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out

October 7, 2019

This is an Open Access article by Francis T. McAndrew (Knox College), from the forthcoming issue of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4.1. ESIC 4.1 will be available in 2020.

Why do some types of settings and some combinations of sensory information induce a sense of dread in humans? This article brings empirical evidence from psychological research to bear on the experience of horror, and explains why the tried-and-true horror devices intuitively employed by writers and filmmakers work so well. Natural selection has favored individuals who gravitated toward environments containing the “right” physical and psychological features and avoided those which posed a threat. Places that contain a bad mix of these features induce unpleasant feelings of dread and fear, and therefore have become important ingredients of the settings for horror fiction and films.