Topic for Oct.11. ( Tue )

[Alex !]

Dirty Pleasure 

The psychological reason you love watching online videos that gross you out.If you've watched zit-popping videos on YouTube or scoured creepy articles you're not alone.

You probably haven’t heard of Sandra Lee, a board certified dermatologist in California, as Dr. Pimple Popper.

She posts videos doing exactly what she advertises: clears out large, pus-filled blemishes (and treats other dermatological conditions, too). It’s objectively disgusting.

And yet, Lee has about 2.5 million subscribers on Instagram and Youtube, with over 1 billion views on the latter. You would think that most of us have more pleasant ways to spend our time on the internet—and yet it’s clearly hard for people look away.

There’s actually a psychological explanation for loving these videos—or at least voluntarily watching more of them even when they make us uncomfortable. “People are often drawn to things that bother them,” says Alexander Skolnick, a psychologist at Saint Joseph’s University who studies what is possibly the most under-appreciated emotion: disgust.

Disgust is a feeling we’ve carried with us since our ancient, reptilian brains had to figure out how to keep us alive. We tend to feel it when there’s something harmful around: We know snakes and some insects mean danger. Vomit means something made someone else sick. Poop carries diseases. When we see any of these, we naturally want to avoid them.

Just about opposite of disgust on the human emotional color wheel, there’s curiosity, which draws us into explore. Whereas disgust repulses us, As BBC reports, our brains have made us sponges for learning. We’re wired to collect information when it’s available to us.

The idea is that these experiences offer a similar excitement, in that they cause fear or pain or repulsion without posing any real existential threat. Our ability to withstand “safe” menaces yields a gratifying sense of mastery. It’s a meta-experience: When you gobble a ghost pepper or cue up “The Exorcist,” you get to experience yourself experiencing something, and you extract enjoyment from your ability to forge a gap between what should feel bad but instead, through sheer will, feels fun.

Normally, the two feelings have a hard time coexisting. The results of an experiment in which they exposed to objects both curious and disgusting (a dissected frog, hair brushes filled with hair).

And then fill out surveys designed to rank their overall curiosity and disgust. Two emotions had an inverse relationship: The more disgusted participants were by the object, the less curious they were by it.

Videos, though, are a completely different experience. Watching gross pimple-popping videos on a screen—or even removing earwax clips like those something gruesome will happen—provides enough distance that  both of these emotions to exist simultaneously. “It’s gross, but it’s not you…it’s something you can turn off. You have power over it.”

In the space of these videos, we can still be disgusted, but not so much we have to look away. We can be curious and explore the situation more so we can, in theory, learn from it to protect ourselves in the future. If we were so disgusted we looked away, “you’ll miss out on something,” 

Disgust is the energy powering a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena, from our never-ending culture wars to the existence of kosher laws to 4chan to mermaids. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.

so, there are mixed feelings of amusement and disgust. Disgust increased equally in both conditions and amusement increased only in the observer condition. As a result mixed feelings of amusement and disgust were more intense in the observer condition.

If that explains why we need disgust, why do we like disgust (you know you've clicked play on at least one cringe-inducing video that's popped up on your Facebook feed)? "It's similar to why people go on roller coasters. You feel fear, even though you know you're safe," he says. "You get a big arousal value out of them." 

The whole point is to freak yourself out in a completely controlled, secure environment-you're never really in danger. The internet, of course, makes it even safer-all you have to do is close out of a window and the scary thing disappears. Plus, no one ever needs to know you chose to look in the first place, provided you scrub your browser history.

We're not all fear-seekers, or freaks for that matter. Skolnick believes that this need to Google can also be chalked up to genuine human curiosity. "We want to know what's gross out there, what's awful out there,"