Thursday, August 31, 2017

Stephen King's 'It' not entirely to blame for people's fear of clowns after all

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  • Many have believed that coulrophobia (fear of clowns) can be attributed to horror movie depictions of clowns. This includes Pennywise from Stephen King's It. Steve Scholzman, M.D of Harvard Medical School says the phobia is far more deep-seated, though.

  • Scholzman claims the fear of clowns has to do with pattern recognition: "Pattern recognition allows to see when things are recognizable but off just enough to where you take caution. That’s why a little kid can recognize something as being a little bit dangerous without quite knowing why they know it’s dangerous. They recognize it as familiar but not quite the same as what they’re seeing." He gives a simple example: we recognize that a pug and a German shepard are both dogs despite looking very different from one another, but clowns distort our idea of what a human face should resemble.

  • Steve Scholzman says that legitimate phobias of clowns (i.e., one who cannot physically be in the same room as a clown) are "pretty rare."

  • The new movie version of It is supposedly causing real-life clowns to lose job opportunities. They claim the movie as well as last year's string of scary clown sightings are both perpetuating the fear of clowns.

What scares you, ONTD?

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