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- Many people find clowns creepy.
- Psychologists think it could be because they're unpredictable, they smile too much, and there's something familiar yet strange about them.
- But others have a paralysing fear of clowns — or coulrophobia.
- Phobias develop when our amygdala fires up and makes us feel scared, then we reinforce the fear by not dealing with it.
- Some phobias seem ridiculous, but for the people who have them, they're incredibly real.
Before people dressed up in garish colours and facepaint started terrorising people, and even before Stephen King's "IT" was published, some people were already completely terrified of clowns.
Psychologists believe cases of coulrophobia, or a fear of clowns, may nowadays have something to do with clowns often being the subject of horror stories — like the sinister character of Pennywise. But a paper from 2008 found that very few children liked clowns at all when they saw them in doctors surgeries, dentists, or hospitals.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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from Business Insider https://ift.tt/2AFO5mr
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