Academia has flirted with Anti-Zombie attitudes and prejudices in the past but this is, I have to say, the most direct use I’ve yet seen of prevailing Undead hatred yet in an academic study:

According to a new study, feeling fear may actually help people to better engage with abstract art.

In the study, which used 85 Brooklyn College students as a sample, participants were assigned randomly to one of five conditions: fear, happiness, high physiological arousal, low physiological arousal or a control group.

Fear was induced with a video of a screaming, zombie-like face, happiness with a clip of a baby and dog interacting, and high and low physiological arousal by having participants complete 30 or 15 jumping jacks, respectively. Participants were then shown four paintings by abstract artist El Lissitzky.

Oh, sure. Use a *screaming* ‘zombie-like’ face to induce fear. First of all, being screamed at is rarely pleasant, so I’m not sure why people conclude it’s the ‘zombie-like’ part that’s distressing. But second, it’s sad that we see more purported people of learning using such ugly stereotypes as the Undead Menace in their work.

I’m a bit mystified by the dog and baby part too. I find babies fairly nerve-wracking, and I can’t be alone in that regard. Dogs too, but that might just be because we have some neighbors with noisy dogs as pets. Still, isn’t anyone afraid the dog’s going to, you know, attack the baby? I’d worry about that a lot more than a Zombie.

At any rate, once again we see the wide-ranging and highly unpredictable effects of Anti-Zombie prejudice. Now fear of the Undead is being used in psychological studies and for art appreciation. Tomorrow, maybe it’ll be used to teach you to appreciate music? Who can say.

It’s a disturbing trend.

Tags: Academia

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, February 19th, 2012 at 1:06 am and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.