Psychologists showed extreme metal fans a series of disgusting images, and their reactions stood out

Fans of extreme metal music appear to view repulsive imagery through a very different lens than the average music listener, according to new research published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. When confronted with gruesome artworks, graphic album covers, and gross photographs, enthusiasts of the genre report less disgust and fewer negative reactions than nonfans. These listeners also tend to find grotesque artworks and album covers more amusing, which the authors suggest may reflect a tendency to treat repulsive visuals as safe and playful rather than threatening.

Disgust is a basic human emotion that evolved as an internal alarm system to help people avoid disease-carrying substances like rotting food, bodily fluids, and corpses. While these triggers usually prompt people to look away, the intensity of that reaction varies from person to person, a trait psychologists call disgust propensity. One subculture that actively embraces repulsive themes is extreme metal, an umbrella term for heavy metal subgenres like death metal and grindcore that feature heavily distorted guitars, fast drumming, and guttural, animalistic vocals.

Extreme metal bands routinely center their lyrics, band names, and visual art around gore, mutilation, and decay. While outsiders often experience tension, anger, or revulsion when exposed to this material, dedicated fans report feelings of joy and empowerment. A driving factor behind this appeal may be a personality trait known as morbid curiosity, or an interest in unpleasant topics like death; a 2022 study covered by PsyPost found that people with higher morbid curiosity are more likely to enjoy and listen to violently themed music.

Much of the research on how negative emotions can produce enjoyable artistic experiences has focused on sadness, such as why people enjoy tear-jerker movies, a phenomenon often explained by the feeling of being emotionally moved. Expanding on this idea, the authors of a 2017 theoretical paper argued that art provides a sense of psychological distance that reminds viewers they are physically safe, allowing them to embrace dark or gross emotions as intense, enjoyable experiences. This aligns with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which indicated that people are more willing to look at distressing imagery when it is framed as artwork rather than a real-life photograph because the artistic context lowers the emotional toll.

When safety and distance are established, grotesque material can even become funny. According to a 2010 experimental study, people tend to experience humor and amusement when something violates a social norm or moral standard, provided that the violation simultaneously feels harmless. In a 2025 study of music listeners, Albert Wabnegger, a senior scientist in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Graz in Austria, and his colleague Anne Schienle found that extreme metal fans generally have a lower tendency to feel disgusted and are less bothered by repulsive sounds, lyrics, and photos than fans of other genres.

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“These findings raised an important follow-up question: Do extreme metal fans also have a different aesthetic experience when confronted with disgust-related content?” Wabnegger told PsyPost. “The present study was designed to address this question—and our results indicate that they indeed do.”

In their latest work, Wabnegger and Schienle wanted to look beyond basic revulsion to see how metal fans actually evaluate repulsive imagery as art. They designed an online experiment to test whether fans and nonfans experience different emotional pathways when viewing graphic visuals, and whether humor plays a role in how they process these images.

To measure how people process challenging visuals, the researchers used a psychological framework called the Vienna Integrated Model of Art Perception. This model outlines five possible emotional outcomes a viewer might experience when looking at art: feeling bored and unengaged; feeling surprised by something new; feeling a sense of harmony and being emotionally moved; having a negative experience marked by confusion and a desire to look away; or experiencing a sense of personal insight and mental transformation.

The researchers recruited participants primarily through university campuses and online forums. After filtering out incomplete surveys and responses that were clicked through too quickly to be genuine, they identified 79 extreme metal fans and 208 nonfans. To confirm that the metal fans truly knew the genre, those participants had to name at least one extreme metal band.

To ensure a fair comparison, the researchers used a statistical matching technique to pair extreme metal fans with nonfans of similar age and gender, while excluding people who liked traditional heavy metal but disliked extreme subgenres. This process yielded a final sample of 74 extreme metal fans and 74 matched nonfans, with an average age of about 30 years. Across the entire group of 148 participants, there were 79 men, 62 women, and 7 nonbinary individuals. The study’s design and analysis plan were preregistered.

Participants first completed questionnaires measuring their general interest in art, their preferences for complex or ambiguous artwork, and their everyday disgust propensity, which gauges how grossed out they would feel in hypothetical scenarios like accidentally touching an amputee’s stump. Each person was then randomly assigned to view one of two separate sets of eight images presented in random order (meaning 16 images were used across the study in total). Each set included two disgusting fine artworks (such as a portrait of a face covered in feces), two extreme metal album covers with band names removed, two everyday gross photographs (such as a skin infection), and two neutral control images created by digitally scrambling disgusting pictures into unrecognizable abstract blocks of color.

Beneath each image, participants rated their immediate reactions on a 1-to-5 scale covering the five art perception outcomes (boredom, surprise, feeling moved, negative confusion, and insight), along with how humorous they found the picture. They also used a 0-to-100 sliding scale to rate how familiar the image looked, how much disgust they felt, and how much they liked it.

The questionnaire results showed that extreme metal fans and nonfans had almost identical levels of general art interest and similar preferences for complex art. However, extreme metal fans reported spending more time listening to music (about 151 minutes on average, compared to 100 minutes for nonfans) and scored lower on everyday disgust propensity, averaging 2.21 on a 0-to-4 scale compared to 2.57 for nonfans.

When looking at the images, the two groups diverged in their emotional reactions. On the 0-to-100 scale, extreme metal fans rated the disgusting artworks 12.73 points less disgusting, the album covers 10.09 points less disgusting, and the gross everyday photos 8.86 points less disgusting than nonfans did. Disgust ratings for the scrambled control images were nearly identical across the two groups.

“We were able to replicate the results from our previous study, again showing reduced disgust reactivity to disgusting content in extreme metal fans,” Wabnegger noted. “This suggests that the effect is relatively stable. Moreover, these findings are striking because they show that, under certain conditions, an emotion that is typically strongly aversive can be experienced in a markedly different, and even enjoyable, way.”

Metal fans also expressed greater liking for the stylized gross imagery. On the 100-point scale, they rated their liking of the artworks 11.90 points higher and the album covers 17.56 points higher than nonfans did, while the two groups did not differ in how much they liked the real-life gross photos or the neutral control images. This may suggest that metal fans appreciate grotesque themes specifically in an artistic context, though fans also rated the album covers as more familiar (by about 17 points), which could partly explain their warmer response to that category.

In terms of the five art perception pathways, the two groups did not show reliable differences in boredom, surprise, feeling moved, or experiencing deep insight. However, they differed on the fourth pathway, which tracks negative reactions and confusion. On the 1-to-5 scale, extreme metal fans scored 0.55 points lower in negative confusion for artworks, 0.57 points lower for album covers, and 0.39 points lower for gross photos compared to nonfans, which the authors interpret as a sign they felt less threatened and less inclined to mentally reject the images.

This reduced negativity was accompanied by a rise in amusement. Extreme metal fans rated the artworks 0.62 points higher and the album covers 0.68 points higher in humor on the 5-point scale than nonfans did. They also found the gross photographs and neutral images slightly funnier than nonfans, though those differences were much smaller (0.21 and 0.26 points, respectively).

“The effects we observe are moderate in size, but robust and consistent across different types of disgust-related stimuli,” Wabnegger explained. “This means that extreme metal fans do not simply differ from non-fans by a tiny, trivial margin; rather, there is a reliable shift in how they emotionally and aesthetically respond to disgust-containing content.”

Merrick Powell, who studies fans of violently themed music and led the 2022 morbid curiosity study described earlier, said the results fit with the idea that fans actively reframe dark material rather than passively absorbing it. “I think the most important takeaway is that it aligns with theories of extreme metal fans being active agents in reappraising extreme content even extending to the visual medium associated with the music,” Powell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne who was not involved in the new study, told PsyPost.

The authors noted that extreme metal culture frequently treats grotesque subjects with tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, such as the Czech band Gutalax, which builds its album art and live shows around toilet humor. Because fans are familiar with these tropes, they may view grotesque art and album covers as playful, harmless norm violations, allowing them to laugh at material that leaves outsiders unsettled.

“Relative to non-fans, extreme metal fans do not experience disgust primarily as something revulsive; instead, they often feel it differently—as something exciting, fun, and part of an aesthetic experience,” Wabnegger said. “In this sense, they are ‘in the game’: they engage with disgust-related themes as playful, aesthetic elements rather than as purely aversive content. Our work shows that context can transform even ‘disgusting’ material into something enjoyable, highlighting how emotional experience can be reshaped.”

Powell pointed out that this shared sense of absurdity is central to the subculture, and it may set extreme metal apart from standard theories of how people safely embrace dark art, such as the Distancing-Embracing model proposed by Winfried Menninghaus and colleagues.

“One thing that extreme metal and other ‘extreme’ music genre fans report is knowing and realizing the music is often ridiculous and over the top, which is a key appeal,” Powell said. “Hence, it is often seen as funny or absurd, whereas people who are not part of these subcultures often do not realize this is the response or reaction that the in-group fans may have. It can be a bit like ‘being in the joke.’ This is where it might differ from some of the other prevalent theories about typically negative emotions and art, such as Menninghaus et al., Distancing-Embracing model, but we would need to do more to know!”

The authors themselves list that model among several frameworks that could account for their findings, alongside the idea that harmless norm violations become funny.

At the same time, the researchers emphasized that these lower disgust ratings do not mean listeners are cold or desensitized to emotion in general. “One important misinterpretation we want to preempt is the idea that extreme metal fans are somehow emotionally blunted or ‘numb’ because of their reduced disgust reactivity,” Wabnegger explained. “Instead, extreme metal fans tend to experience disgust-related content (such as images depicting decay) as more fun or entertaining. In other words, they are more deeply engaged in the aesthetic and emotional ‘game’ that such content invites.”

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these results. Because the study measured participants at a single point in time, it cannot determine cause and effect. It remains an open question whether listening to extreme metal gradually desensitizes people and teaches them to find gore funny, or whether people who already have a strong stomach and a dark sense of humor are naturally drawn to the genre in the first place.

Sorting out whether fans are actively reframing gross material, perhaps by enjoying their own reactions to it (what psychologists call metaemotions), or simply becoming accustomed to it will require tools beyond self-report surveys. “It continues an interesting conversation about the role of reappraisal/metaemotions vs desensitization,” Powell noted. “It is a challenging question to answer, but future work involving physiological measures and other ‘pre-conscious’ response indicators in this domain would be really interesting.”

There are a few other limitations to keep in mind. The participant sample had a higher proportion of men, particularly in the extreme metal group, which reflects the male-dominated nature of the metal fanbase but limits how well the findings apply to other demographics. Additionally, the experiment relied entirely on still visual images. Future longitudinal studies tracking listeners over time, as well as experiments combining music with visuals, could help clarify how sound and imagery work together to turn revulsion into entertainment.

“Looking ahead, we aim to investigate the role of humor in the perception of disgust-related content,” Wabnegger said. “Our findings so far suggest that extreme metal fans may not only tolerate such content better, but also be more likely to interpret it as playful or amusing.”

Beyond explaining the appeal of extreme music, Wabnegger suggested that understanding how people use humor to reframe revulsion could eventually help patients in clinical settings. “In the longer term, this line of work could have applied relevance,” he added. “Disgust plays a central role in several mental disorders characterized by heightened disgust reactivity, such as OCD. If humor can modulate how disgust is experienced—turning aversive material into something more playful or manageable—it might offer a promising additional tool for interventions, for example by integrating humorous or ‘gamified’ elements into exposure-based treatments.”

“Our findings also suggest a broader message: emotional responses are not fixed; they are strongly shaped by context, expectations, and shared cultural ‘rules of the game,'” Wabnegger concluded. “And finally, as an avid extreme-metal fan myself: listen to metal!”

The study, “Gore, Guts, and Giggles: Aesthetic Processing of Disgust Stimuli in Extreme Metal Fans,” was authored by Albert Wabnegger and Anne Schienle.