The Psychology Behind the Fear of Clowns: Exploring Coulrophobia Phenomenon and Its Causes

KOMPAS.com – Some people consider clowns to be funny and entertaining, but not a few consider them mysterious and scary.

Coulrophobia or the fear of clowns is a widely recognized phenomenon. Studies show that this fear can be experienced by children to adults with various cultural backgrounds.

Why are clowns considered scary?

Launching BBC UK, phobia expert Adam Cox presents several theories about why some people find clowns scary.

First, according to Cox, clowns look unnatural. We know that clowns are people, but their appearance doesn’t look like much to humans.

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Face paint hides their facial expressions so we can’t read their true emotions.

This is a psychological experience known as ‘the uncanny’, which is when something is actually familiar to us, but is strange and unsettling.

In addition, the clown’s unnatural and exaggerated movements also contributed to this.

In 1986, noted writer Stephen King released his work entitled IT, which was adapted into a TV mini-series in 1990. The series starred Tim Curry as Pennywise.

In the stories, the clown Pennywise appears in places that should be safe, such as the back garden or the library in broad daylight, and terrorizes children.

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Cox thinks that modern triggers for coulrophobia may have something to do with IT, and the remake of the piece proves that Pennywise is still terrifying for a lot of people.

His suspicions were confirmed when Cox received more clients for coulrophobia in 2018, after the first IT film was released.

According to Cox, Pennywise’s portrayal created a modern archetype for the terrifying killer clown character.

Level of fear of clowns

Scientific American seeks to uncover why people are afraid of clowns and understand the psychology behind this phenomenon.

To that end, Scientific American developed a psychometric questionnaire to assess the prevalence and severity of coulrophobia.

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This questionnaire was completed by an international sample of 987 people aged between 18 and 77 years.

As a result, more than half of respondents (53.5%) said they were afraid of clowns at least to some degree, with 5% of respondents saying they were “very scared” of clowns.

Interestingly, the percentage reporting an extreme fear of clowns is slightly higher than that reported for many other phobias, such as animal phobia (3.8%), blood/injection/injury phobia (3.0%), phobia of heights (2.8 %), phobia of still water or weather events (2.3%), and phobia of closed spaces (2.2%).

They also found that women are more afraid of clowns than men, although the reasons are unclear.

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2023-07-06 11:30:00
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