FEAR OF CLOWNS
Research from the University of South Wales published in Frontiers in Psychology claims to have got to the bottom of why so many people are afraid of clowns. The researchers carried out an international survey involving 1,000 adult participants from 64 countries and discovered that more than half of them suffered from coulrophobia, as the fear of clowns is known (see FT226:34-41), to some degree. Five per cent admitted to being “extremely afraid” of clowns, a higher percentage than suffered from more familiar phobias such as fear of heights, enclosed spaces, or animals.
The main reasons people gave for fearing clowns was their exaggerated facial features and the makeup they wear hiding the emotional signals we usually get from facial expressions. In some cases, the fear was triggered by the depiction of evil clowns in the media, such as Pennywise in Stephen King’s , while while others found their unpredictable behaviour scary. One of the least common causes, though, was having had a frightening personal experience with clowns. The researchers suspect that none of the individual elements may be in itself frightening,
