Deciphering morbid curiosity: Psychological mechanisms underlying the voluntary viewing of negative images

The principle of hedonism assumes that people pursue pleasure and positive experiences; however, we often observe that people voluntarily seek negative experiences in various daily settings—sometimes interpreted as the manifestation of “morbid curiosity.” This study tested four hypotheses to appraise people’s voluntary viewing of negative images: novelty/curiosity, metacognitive miscalibration, emotional arousal, and optimal stimulation. We used a paradigm in which participants could choose whether to view a positively or negatively valenced image. The results revealed that the rate of choosing to view positive and negative images decreased when participants had already seen the images previously. This result supports the novelty/curiosity hypotheses. However, contrary to the metacognitive miscalibration, emotional arousal, and optimal stimulation hypotheses, participants overestimated their negative feelings prior to viewing negative images, individual differences in sensation-seeking did not predict people’s choice of viewing negative images, and emotional arousal did not have an inverted-U relationship with choice behavior. These findings indicate a potential mechanism underlying people’s behavior in voluntarily seeking negative information, although we still observe a large unexplained variance vis-à-vis participants’ voluntary choice of negative images.