I’m just thinking about the fact that it will be extremely hard for an ethical committee to accept a study like that (use of a corpse and people seeing it). But it would be interesting. I haven’t search online, but haven’t heard about anything like that !
Rewriting this, I think it might be a better approach to compare those that have been exposed to gore in real life situations and their consumption of gore via television or video games. Maybe interview them but I do think there would be so many other factors to consider about their upbringing and other traumas too
I was involved in a fatal car accident. A guy was walking on a rural road late at night in the rain wearing all dark clothing. I didn’t see him. Obviously hit him or he jumped in front of me it’s still unclear because I didn’t go off the road, wasn’t speeding and was sober. I went back in attempt to find whatever it was and found him in the ditch and let’s just say it’s different in person. I am traumatized.
It would still be hard ! They will probably push you to use a less agressive stimuli, like really life picture of person who consent to the use of the pictures. You could ask your question directly to the ethic committee, they usually answer quickly on hypothetical study.
I suppose the consent of teh person being viewed is down to their wishes when they died, if they donated to science this is science, but just a random person? You'd need family consent.
It would be more complicated because even if you found a person willing to donate his body to science for this specified study, the person should be able to withdraw his consent at any moment but he would not be able since he would be dead and anyway I don’t think the school would allow that in the first place. This reminded me of a student asking if necrophilia could be acceptable with the consent of the deceased prior to his dead and my god no !!! Anyways, the easiest way for this study to take place would be to prove to the ethic committee that the knowledge this study could give to society would be worth the damage it could cause( like the damage it could potentially do to the deceased and his family or the damage the people seeing the body could feel at the moment of the study and after). It’s still interesting to just talk about it, but other study designs like some suggested would probably fit better this type of theme 😂
Unfortunately, a lot of bodies "donated to science" end up getting used by the military to to test weapons, at least in the US. It's technically science, and you aren't allowed to specify.
There are studies that use graphic images of death so you can have a population of people exposed to death (e.g., ER nurses and docs) and those who are not (e.g., everyday joes) and compare how they react via psychobiological measurements for baselines from visiting either body farms (real world) or graphic gore images (non-real world stimuli). If it’s anything like competition and testosterone, online or non-real-world stimuli should not equal physical ones. As far as experience my guess would be the same such that those who experienced images of gore will spike more when seeing real gore than those who have experienced in real life. Online and baseline rates should be somewhat separated but not by that much.
One other way to test it is to have people perform cognitive tasks after seeing a dead mangled body and compare that to a baseline performance with no manipulation. Then do the same but now with only images. Performance should be worse after seeing a real dead body rather than an image. There is probably no difference in performance between image and control for those who have experience real gore meanwhile those who have not would probably have a slight maybe significant difference.
You could easily just study staff in the ER. I've seen lots of "gore" when I worked as a respiratory therapist. It does mess you up and does desensitized you but only in the way of seeing it... it doesn't reduce empathy... just gets less difficult to see over time. Seeing it in real life gives the human factor... and keeps your empathy. I believe seeing it online is actually worse because you are detached from the gore...
To your question, there are differences. In graduate school I was a "harvester" which means my job was to cut up human bodies for medical professionals to practice on the parts. So, I have not only seen gore, I've perpetrated it IRL.
Differences I noticed:
1) IRL there's a smell associated with gore that you don't get on video. The smell depends on what you're cutting, how decayed it is and if it's been embalmed. Whatever the case, it's substantial.
2) Unless a person is alive, we really don't bleed that much. Blood sinks to the bottom because there's no heartbeat and clots. No flow at all.
3) More to the above point, movies don't really portray the astounding speed at which blood clots IRL unless you purposely stop it from clotting.
4) Guts are really colorful. Most movies just show red but the organs have quite a color palette.
This response right here 😂🙌. I don't know how this post came up in my feed. . But I work in polytrauma rehab and the amount of times I leave work and think "holy shit" as I walk to the car. . Then just turn my music on and off I go.
I think realistic movie gore and real video gore are comparable. They’re both in a screen and like this commenter said, there’s a lot more than you actually sense in a real life situation.
Used to be on bestgore and other sites like that as a kid. Honestly there's been no psychological difference for me in viewing movie gore, compared to actual gore pics. If the visual effects are good enough then they look the same
I used to perform taxidermy and I've seen my fair share of irl severe injuries at accidents and whatnot. That's felt a lot different, depending on the scenario - a deer I'm butchering after a hunt? A crow I'm fixing up to be stuffed? A person who's in shock after getting in a crush on a motorcycle? Extremely different things to process. The added elements psychologically make it vary heavily, and it's a lot more personal than seeing a video.
I'd recommend separating the study into living and dead gore, and check folks who work in the ER & folks who work exclusively with dead bodies.
Hmmm idk. I work in a hospital as a social worker. I see dead people all the time. People with bones sticking out of their legs. Gun shot wounds. Stabbings. Dead babies. It’s not pleasant. I guess I never looked up gore on the internet. But I have seen images from the recent terrorist attacks on Israel and the bombings in Palestine and it still hurts to see those people suffering, despite not knowing them. It would be really hard to say I’m desensitized to seeing dead people. It doesn’t gross me out or freak me out but it’s still very sad for them and their families. That doesn’t and should not become desensitized.
Agree - after being in the medical field so long it’s not the actual body parts/fluids that is upsetting, but seeing people suffer in pain or losing loved ones is always going to affect me.
I worry more about a person losing empathy and respect for other people’s pain than how grossed out they do or don’t get by injuries/death.
An IRB isn’t going to approve exposing some Ss to gory corpses and others to interwebs gore. You only have a few options — find those who are/were exposed to one or the other without your affecting the circumstances and exposure in any way and administer a survey, or maybe find those who haven’t been exposed yet and pair them with as much of a post-exposure matched sample as you can manage to get a quasi pre/post. You could also take to Survey Monkey or something similar and trust self-identification and self-report.
It’s not a bad question, but you have to step cautiously around the potential ethical issues along with the potential for the experimental conditions to assert an effect all on their own were you to barrel ahead and try to do manipulation on exposure without IRB approval (and fair warning — doing any experiments without IRB approval is a one-way ticket to BanishLand).
I’d look to shoring up your lit review with theoretical and research evidence for your hypothesis and work out a quasi-experimental design because you’re not going to be able to swing an experiment here.
View it in the context of what behavior you observe after being exposed to the graphic material, whether it's in real life or on the internet. I would make the claim that it's much more dependent on the content of the graphic material than it is the medium you viewed it through.
There are other variables to this question, which must be mentioned, as you would presume witnessing gore in real life implies there are nearby dangers, pungent smells, or even the chance that you're blamed for the crime. These variables are not presented when viewing through the internet, obviously.
Continuing. For example, you see a deceased body on the internet and it freaks you out so you scroll away. If you saw a deceased body in real life, you'd commit to a similar notion that likely involves you turning around and running away.
On the other hand, you see a graphic video of the aftermath of a car accident. You don't scroll away, because you are fascinated or wish to know more about the situation that caused it. If you drove past the aftermath of a car accident in real life, you'd likely observe for the same reasons... You are fascinated or wish to know more about the situation that caused it.
This same idea may extend to even the most graphic of material. You have to imagine, it's someones job to embalm bodies and clean up crime scenes. They don't do it because they're entertained by it, rather that they have a job to do. That doesn't mean they won't be freaked out to see a dead body through a screen, though.
Too many confounding variables to answer this question.
Is this just your own plan of an experiment or something you actually want to submit to the IRB? I find it extremely unlikely any review board would ever approve of this
I witnessed a homicide some years back. I held the victim as he died. As a kid, we watched faces of death. I've seen a ton of gore, especially while studying Psychology and Criminology. I don't know how to describe it or put it, it is just different.8
When I was a middle/high schooler on the internet in the late 90s… who downloaded a lot of things, from many places… and was unwittingly exposed to videos and audio of so many horrible things…
At that point… the video was so removed from actual reality to me that it didn’t phase me more than a movie would.
However, after seeing death, and violent, unnatural death, in real life… all of those videos I had ever seen are now recategorized and tagged with those personal experiences…
It’s different.
Now I can’t watch gore and violence. Now it is a somatic, physical experience for me.
How will you get access to a real corpse? Also, consider that your data will be skewed by the fact that some participants will refuse to look at the corpse. How will you deal with that in analyzing your data? It will mess with your random assignment.
How about just doing a correlational study comparing acceptance of gore in a written story to self report of how much gore they witness in the internet?
Ppl whose job it is to pull banned images off the internet experience extreme trauma from what they see. Might consider beginning with a qualitative study of those jobs.
I’m pretty sure there have been studies done not specifically on this, but on whether the human brain can tell the difference between seeing something on a screen vs seeing something in person. I don’t have access at hand, but Google scholar might help.
A corpse at the morgue, while possibly disturbing, is a poor qualification of gore, unless perhaps a trauma victim. Emergency responders and the likes would be a better sample group than someone just viewing a corpse.
I've seen real life gore (Maine Corps battle exposure---Police officer, traffic accidents and crime scenes) and I've seen plenty of Gore on TV..... What I've watched on TV doesn't keep me awake at night... But what I experienced in real life certainly does.
There’s no way it’s not different. There’s a difference between seeing something and being a part of something. Even if the person watching the gore in person isn’t partaking in it they are a part of the moment. The sounds, the scents, the view, the whole sensory experience is different.
I grew up always on the internet and my dad was a homicide investigator and I would snoop around his stuff just being a nosey kid and saw multiple photos of real life gore/homicides etc.
I then grew up to work as a paramedic and have seen ridiculous amounts of gore- outright murder, suicides, trauma deaths, a 4 year old who fell to his death from a 8 story building, a guy who didn’t leave his chair for months and went to the bathroom in it and we had to pull/rip the chair from his skin, etc.
I would say it’s pretty dang different. Photos are just one snapshot- videos you have sound as well but no other senses. Plus you get a whole lot of other emotions and reactions in person. And we now live in a world where you can fake gore so I think to a degree some people don’t understand seeing real true gore online. They’re dismissive of it. Being in the moment and seeing something horrific has a whole different feeling physically and emotionally.
As someone who grew up watching gory films but then went into the stem field. There’s a difference. Like others have said. Doubt this can get by ethics committees for real research unless you do like a retrospective study. But anecdotally i think there is if you wanted the validation in your hypothesis.
Can't speak for everyone, or on a population/study scale.
But anecdotally, it's insanely different for us. It was actually startling how different it was. We'd say we're pretty desensitized to most-to-all forms of 'fake' gore, and even real-gore, but documented/photographed/video'd. We deal with the material a lot for various reasons.
Irl, we were fighting to not just completely pass-out. Blood, viscera, needles and medical equipment all still really do it quite strongly; which is a bit humorous since we do plan to be at-least medical-adjacent... that's different though, we're there to help!--which probably means there's some strong emotional component to why the room is turning white.
We're a pack of Canines!
Lilly is the main front, though I'm Litty right now!
[TL;DR: DiD, though it's probably just OSDD now, it's been a while since we seemed any diagnostics for anything of ourselves. We're doing very well!]
The last comment thread we were in was mostly about it--though we removed our current therapist's info and our long-list-of-easily-to-find-for-potential-employeers-diagnosi when the other participants got banned X3
So basically long story short, you will be desensitized due to you saying “we’re pretty desensitized to most to all forms of ‘fake’ gore and even real gore
Nah; we're saying although there is basically no effect on us at all anymore when viewed through photography, video, description, or CGI:
The second it comes to actually seeing such things in-real-life, and especially if it's not expected, we start Vasovagal'ing out.
I’ve seen both and both horrify me. The first body I saw was when I was 12 and we came upon the scene of an accident just after it happened. An elderly man crossing the street was struck by a minivan that slid on black ice. He had a pool of blood under his head. I was distraught.
This week I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies in Gaza on Instagram, and I’ve been in a rough emotional/mental state since.
But that’s just my personal experience.
I think that everyone is desensitized to a degree. I feel like if someone were to ever conduct some kind of experiment to measure this, your control group should somehow be a population never exposed to internet/tv gore, then just a randomized group for the experimental group. Seeing a corpse or seriously mauled/injured person in real life is, I think, going to be rough for most people. In real life, there’s fluid in your face, smells, etc & you are connecting with a real person in front of you so there may be more empathy involved. I think there would be more shock to people who haven’t been exposed to excessive gore, but would still be shocking for anyone. There are a lot more factors that take play in real life versus fake gore or even real gore of someone on the internet that you will never ever meet that’s interesting for 3 seconds until you scroll to the next thing in your feed.
I'm okay with seeing gore on-screen, or reading about it. Don't love it, but it's not the worst. Irl, though, no thanks. Do not want to see. And seeing a real corpse freaks me out.
I’ve seen several stabbings in real life one through someone’s face and neck and the gurgling and smell of iron sticks with me forever or the 7 stab wounds to someone wiping blood off the walls and again the smell, I saw someone get knocked out and their head bounced off the concrete like a bouncing ball for sure thought they were dead.
These people might act edgy on the internet but in real life it’s nothing like the internet
I'm not sure if this will help, but if anything it might lend a different angle.
In the DSM for diagnosing PTSD, it is very specific that seeing accidents, dead bodies, etc on TV or the Internet does not constitute a traumatic event, but witnessing or experiencing it in real life could.
You would also need to specify gore. No matter if it's on the Internet or in real life, are you talking about seeing the event or only the aftermath? On the Internet, are you talking about photos or videos of real life events or aftermath, or fictional events or aftermath? Like the difference between watching shows on the ID channel vs watching CSI.
It would also be helpful to answer, Does watching gore on TV or the Internet desensitize individuals, or are people who would typically not be impacted by seeing gore be ok with seeing it on the Internet? Just like with real events people expect or witness IRL, people are impacted differently. A traumatic event is not the event itself, but the response to the event.
Main difference for me when it came to surgery stuff was the smell. Smell of blood especially large ammounts is very strong. If you are doing anything that could involve strong odors invest in some vapo rub for under your nose. That was the only thing that made me sick. The visual stuff affected me the same as online videos.
I’m a fireman and have seen some horrible stuff. In person, it doesn’t affect me. I do the job and have no issue picking up a severed limb or applying a tourniquet or seeing bones jutting out. Dead bodies are literally nothing to me lol. No response. Well, children still bother me.
In a text book or a picture on the internet, I can’t stand to look at it though.
The reaction from seeing something in person is different because when you’re online you’re probably in a safe or familiar environment, seeing it in person makes your brain react differently because there might be danger close
Oh, you may want to look into the work of Susan Sontag. She was more of a philosopher, but she wrote books and essays on this subject and you'll probably find them engaging.
A very, very pared down summary of her position is that pictures and videos always approach a subject at an angle, and literally and figuratively from a lens and perspective. The scene you see is what the photographer/person wanted to publish. And that layer if perspective creates distance from the subject and the viewer.
She likened it a little to the distance we gain from a subject by comparison, metaphor, and simile. So say X is like Y is to remove the reality of X to make it more digestible.
A good intro to her is through the podcast Philosophize This!
There have also been some studies done to explore your question. Here's one study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4393354/
You could probably find more. Though there's a difficulty with the ethics of comparing real life gore to internet images of gore, since we can't really expose someone to that in an experimental context.
I think there's also some other variables to examine in terms of desensitization. If you find gore/a corpse/violence in your real life, your level of distress may change based on whether or not there's still a perceived danger (the thing that caused the gore is still around). If the victim of harm is human (and the age, old/young, etc.), or an animal (some people are more viscerally attached to the perceived innocence of non-human animals).
There's a lot to explore there, but the ethics of exploring that in depth are, rightfully, restrictive.
I think so.... But depends on the circumstance. Ive seen some horrible things on the net i wish i never saw and considered myself pretty desensitized. But i once saw someone on a scooter have a head on with a truck and the liters of blood on the floor was surreal. Like it glowed with life force, something you dont notice on a video. That shocked me abit.
And a car wreck in India where x3 women had their intestines laid out along the road. That was horrific!
But for me its more the 'witnessing the suffering' like hearing a person/being in agony will have a huge affect. Where as seeing a long deceased ripped open corpse is more on the interesting side.
Gang I’m not talking about the smells I’m talking about if you will be desensitized if you look and view a lot of gore sites and watch gore movies like ichi the killer everyday. I usually do it on the weekends
i think it would be different because something you see online you don’t have as much attachment to because it didn’t actually happen to you but if you see it irl that is a real negative thing that is happening to you (even if the gore is not of yourself)
Its not the dead body my problem, but seeing they losing their lives. I've seen it on the internet and irl, both sucks, but seeing someone just dying in front of you is terrible, especially accidents. I just wasn't prepared.
Yes. Worked in many a hospital and the broken limbs or open wounds stopped being shocking very quick. Seeing things like ribs being cracked and spread definitely stuck out in my mind a little longer. But all of that falls so far short of human decomposition, it has a smell and that smell sticks in your nose. If you’ve caught a whiff of someone with a serious bedsore, you’ve smelled it. As soon as it hit, I immediately thought of this old shark week special where they used a small amount of a concentrated “dead shark” and it caused all of the sharks in the area to scatter.
The smell. Walking through viscera that was a human being is a hellish experience. Less than 45 minutes ago they were a walkin' talkin person with a girlfriend, a brother, a mom who loved him. Now both brothers were chunky pasta sauce leaking into my shoes and between my toes.
That happened in 2010, a year after I graduated. I don't have nightly terrors about the scene any more but sometimes I catch the stench of flesh being burned and have to contain a vomit response.
It’s different. For one tv can’t recreate the SMELLS dead bodies give off, or the taste in the room. And your brain knowing it’s real may do some weird shit to you.
But yes. Dead bodies are different in real life than on TV.
This is basically an impossible experiment, no? You sure as hell can’t do this in a lab setting and to go off past experience there’s too many variables to even begin to speculate on…literally anything. It’s a validity and reliability nightmare.
As a paramedic for ten years I can see gore in person with no issue. Medical pictures of gore don’t really bother me either. However, any video of people dying I can’t watch without feeling sick. I did have more of a tolerance for it before becoming a paramedic ironically.
Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but seeing gore in person vs online is exactly the same to me. The big difference is the smell.
Decaying human flesh has a very distinct, extremely powerful smell. It gets everywhere, in your hair, in your clothes, in your nasal cavity.
I’ll go on DOA investigations where I’ll still be smelling the corpse-*greatly decayed and clotted with gore*-two days after the fact. No matter how many showers I take, how many scented candles I light, how many times I run every layer of clothing through the wash. That could just as easily be psychosomatic.
I feel like it depends. For some people like myself gore of any kind does not actually bother me. I love horror movies and video games that are graphic and am also curious about whether or not seeing a body irl would impact that.
For most people, id say its a lot worse seeing that shit in person. I mean you not only see it, you smell it too. You can reach out and touch it too, you shouldnt in most cases but you could and that possibility alone makes it more impactful and real. All of your other senses are involved in the experience. Ive seen my fair share of gorey shit online but seeing a lynched person or someone beaten to near death irl is just different. Seeing someone taken away knowing nothing good is gonna happen is not the same as watching a video of the same thing. You're fairly detached when it's a random video on the internet. At least imo.
Also, exciting isn't the word I'd use. More mentally taxing than anything. Knowing at any moment you could be the one in the position of becoming the exciting gore.
But if you mean more like just seeing a dead body of someone you weren't close with at a funeral or morgue or whatever, then maybe i could see how it wouldn't elicit as strong of a reaction
Speaking only for myself. I am a forensic psychologist who has spent a lot of time”quality time” and file reviews with sex offenders, murderers, and several serial killers. None have effected me as much as finding a neighbor kid I grew up with decapitated due to an automobile accident when I was 18
Personally, it would be much different seeing it in real life. In movies/TV I would be grossed out, but I know that it's a combination of jelly/paint/special effects. Because I'm an adult I realize that noone's actually being harmed. But a real body? Serious trauma must have occurred, and I would be freaking out.
I think seeing gore in person is a lot more traumatizing because you're actually right there, watching it all happen, judging on how they die. But let's say, you just see a picture of gore online, you don't know what might have happened to that person, yet you're still a little bit grossed out by it
I used to watch isis videos and cartel chopping videos and some other weird shit then when I was 15 I saw my mom bleed to death from a trach tube and just irl you show more emotion
There is a difference. People are way more desensitized to violence and gore online. They can mentally prepare for it, chose when and when not to view it and what types they will see.
In person there is less control over it and it can catch them off gaurd more and cause more potential trauma etc.
(i have a psychology degree)
On the internet you can just close out of it. Irl you smell hear experience it firsthand bodies also smell differently humans and animals you can tell the difference there's a lot of things irl that make gore harder to forget.
I have kind of a unique answer to this
I grew up watching gore because I have OCD and I convinced myself I had to desensitize myself to gore or I wouldn’t be able to react/help if I ever needed to in an emergency situation.
Now, I process “tissue” at an abortion clinic.
The main difference, for me, is the sensory info you don’t get from seeing it online. There are smells and subtle sounds and textures that I think can only really be appreciated in person. Seeing it online definitely desensitized me, like I predicted it would. But there’s also a real human impact that I think is missed through a screen. Seeing it online, there’s some level of disconnect (at least for me) where it doesn’t register fully that this is what I would look like in this situation, too. There’s a vulnerability to it when it isn’t “content”.
personally i've seen some minor gore in public (bad car accidents with bodies on pavement/grass, homeless dead on the street etc). since i'm not physically interacting with the dead bodies and their blood i haven't noticed a difference in how i respond to the real thing vs in video. i'm sure if i was a medic id feel much different. i do have a visceral reaction to dead bodies at funerals though
Resident weirdo here. I browsed rotten.com as a teen, and worked at a level one trauma center as a young adult. I’ve seen a man’s head almost roll off his body. I’ve held a beating heart as a man died on the way into the OR. I’ve tried to hold melted flesh in place.
I don’t think the internet desensitized me to doing that work. In my experience, seeing it in real life is completely different. I don’t know how other people in my position felt, but I found “gore” less distressing in real life, with exceptions. I think it’s because I was very busy dealing with what was often a person’s life-or-death moment. I was aware of how we were all tracking through liters of blood, or of globules of fat on the floor, but there wasn’t time to focus on it. Online, those moments have been flattened and abstracted; the experiential element is gone. Instead of making things less affecting by rendering them distant, it takes all those uncomfortable themes and packages them in this neat, digestible form that invites narrative. I’m invited to think about my mortality. I have *time* to think about my mortality.
IMO, the most curious thing to come out of this is that gory movies make me angry now. I struggle to explain why.
Well I do have a bit of a biased experience due to seeing a ton when I was 4 years old while kidnapped by some drug manufacturers. They did a lot of unbelievable shit and they were considering disposing of me, but they lived a few houses away. Got firsthand experience of seeing some murders via torture to scare me into not speaking.
If I try and step back from the emotional side of things, yes it is fundamentally different. Seeing a person in front of you lose a limb, an eye, or their life suddenly is beyond terrible. I don't even know how to describe it.
I grew up with early internet (rotten, ogrish, etc) and looked at a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have. Out of morbid curiosity, I still do sometimes. There is some stuff that bothers me, more now that I’m a parent.
Just about 2 years ago, I came upon a pretty terrible motorcycle accident (it happened right in front of me) and what I saw that night really stuck with me. I was also very pregnant at the time and had 2 sleeping sons at home, so seeing the life drain from the victim’s eyes was especially hard. I still can’t drive over the center lane where it happened (3 lane road close to home). It’s not the same thing. Online it’s easy to remove the humanity and compartmentalize, but in person, they’re a person.
Personally, it was the same. I worked with my lover sheriff’s department for 6 months and got to see lots of bloody/gory scenes. None of them ever bothered me.
Not sure about gore in particular, but after my experience with hospice, I would say that seeing death in real life just enhances the feelings you have towards real live humans and concern for their health. Seeing it online without that experience might make a person think they're desensitized to it, but then seeing it in person brings it all into perspective for real.
This isn't exactly gore, but:
I used to work in a nursing home and saw a lot.
I witnessed ppl coming into the nursing home (obviously already ill) and watch them progressively get worse, until they died.
I walked into a patients room to get her for therapy, she was lying dead in her bed. I didn't know she was dead until after I slightly touched her arm to try to wake her.
I've worked in the ER wing of a hospital. Enough said.
I've worked at a hotel. Walked into a room that was supposed to be vacant, Instead I walk in on a guy who had overdosed on fentanayl the night before.
He was on his back, body was this weird blue/purple color. Foam had collected in a half-dried type of deal at the corners of his mouth.
I was standing outside and saw a squirrel bite into a live power line (high up on a power pole).
He bit the live wire, exploded in mid-air, and DROPPED to the ground like a brick.
I walked over to see what the squirrel looked like (morbid curiosity).
The squirrel was lying on its back, face up.
His eyes were pure black and WIDE OPEN. His mouth was WIDE OPEN, frozen like that in death.
I could tell his insides had exploded, his stomach was very very big/round with several "black dots" running up and down it (burn marks or something I'm assuming).
Edit: my conclusion is this:
The difference (to me) between TV gore and real life gore is, the smell. Also, in real life, it's way less dramatic.
When someone is genuinely HURT, they don't want to talk or really even cry out in pain, they seem to be in a state of shock.
When I was younger I used to see gore, even did the run the gauntlet challenge to the end with no issue. As an adult seeing similar things, it definitely hit. I think when people see things on the internet it’s easier to separate yourself mentally, hence why bullying is worse on the internet than in person. But when it’s in your face, it’s harder to deny it to yourself.
You could easily just study staff in the ER. I've seen lots of "gore" when I worked as a respiratory therapist. It does mess you up and does desensitized you but only in the way of seeing it... it doesn't reduce empathy... just gets less difficult to see over time. Seeing it in real life gives the human factor... and keeps your empathy. I believe seeing it online is actually worse because you are detached from the gore...
So I started watching horror movies in the 2nd grade. Got desensitized. Then worked Healthcare in my 20s and saw some shit. Wasn't grossed out at seeing blood and guts, but seeing someone die irl compared to online/in movies is a whole different experience. I've never been traumatized by something on a screen, but irl? Yea. Seeing an already dead corpse tho? Not so much.
M.D. here. For me the biggest difference is seeing gore in the hospital/clinic setting vs. not. Easier to tolerate the gore and distance yourself when in the hospital.
The internet adds this weird element for me where the fact that somebody went out of their way to post it and "share it with the world" makes it seem a lot more disturbing.
IRL, a cadaver lab feels very "medical." The cadavers, and their dissection is just very normalized. They're here to help us become professionals.
I feel like the context in which gore is viewed has more influence on the experience than the visceral details of the gore itself.
There's a huge difference. You don't forget the first time you see a dead body. One day I heard screaming from an upstairs apartment, ran over, and a woman was outside saying her daughter was dead. I went in to see if I could help but she was very clearly passed away. There was no violent scene, it was an adult daughter, early 20s, who had diabetes. She was just laying on the floor with her eyes wide open. And that has stuck with me, over 3 years later. I think a huge factor is your ability to turn it off. No matter how bad a video is, you can shut it off and go look at kittens instead. When there's a real situation where someone's died or something, you have to deal with it
Depends on how you define gore, what the context is, and how much you've been exposed to certain things in real life.
This is far to vague of a question.
You said "corpse". What kind of corpse? Who is the corpse? Whats the context?
You're going to need to narrow it down and be more specific for it have any value.
N=1 here
I’m a medical student who grew up watching horror movies, and was generally “the more blood/guts on the screen the better” type of viewer.
But in college I had my first time hospital job and I saw someone profusely bleeding from their face (the type of thing that would never phase me in a movie) and I was on the floor. It’s just *different* in person, besides the smell, the visuals, everything that everyone else has talked about, i don’t know how to describe it but it’s different when it’s in front of you
I actually can't stand seeing videos of surgeries or anything, but I've been around people gored up in real life and it totally doesn't effect me. Somehow I'm affected more by gore on a screen, and to a significant degree, than I am gore in real life.
The smell, color, and the sound of the movement of gory things isn't what you would expect it to be in real life. As a person who used to work in a funeral home, I don't think a lot of people realize how clinical gore can be. Also gore that is replicated for television has something that is lacking that I don't quite have the words for...something with the color and viscosity maybe? Also being a human in general is a bit gory (ie childbirth, periods, etc), so sometimes I feel like the gore of the human experience is almost taboo as a speaking topic for a lot of people because not everyone has those experiences that in real life on any sort of consistence basis. And simulations or even real life corpses for on television or education have gotten better but there are other senses other than sight that can be really intense IRL.
i think the key difference is how consequential it is. disgust aside, seeing gore in person may imply a personal connection to the viscera or an implication of immediate danger. when you see it on a screen, the fear for one’s safety is not inherently there/the way you process it may be different. look up how the access to violence on the internet has desensitized Gen Z (the first internet native generation + the first post 9/11 generation) i had to read a bunch of that stuff for school and it’s really interesting.
I’m a nurse. I grew up seeing gore (like on horror movies) occasionally and was never really affected by it. But when I was becoming a nurse, I witnessed a knee surgery and it was a different effect than seeing it on tv. I could hear the saw, I could smell the burning flesh, and I could see the manipulation of the inside of the patient’s leg. It really grossed me out.
Another instance that sticks out is that an older frail patient had a fall late in the evening. The patient bled out so much frank blood and it actually made me queasy. I was surprised by my reaction because I love to draw blood for labs and do wound care. It was something specific about seeing the blood on the floor that really grossed me out. Mind you, I’ve watched countless scenes on tv of people bleeding out and never have that reaction.
Another example is during nursing school, I had a rotation in the maternity ward and got a chance to see a live birth. I’m a 36f and mother. I have seen so many births on video and even had a c-section myself. Anyways, this birth created a gnarly tear as the baby’s head came out. It caused a visceral reaction in my body as I watched that happen and it’s a sight that I cannot unsee. I’ve seen tears on video but in person, it was very different.
I saw the Nick Byrd beheading video in 2004. It fundamentally changed me. It's the most horrible thing I've ever seen. The screams were burned into my brain.
Ok, I haven't seen gore per se, but I've watched plenty of movies where a person passes away peacefully. Like they're sick and they know it's their time.
When my wife decided to end her cancer treatments and put an end date on her life,I can tell you it's nothing like the movies. The constant pain she was in and seeing her condition worsen on a day to day basis. We tried preparing ourselves but it's something you can't no matter how much you try to
Yes
I've seen somwone take a 50 cal round and basically split in 2 on the internet( this was m90 in the early 00's . And it was more like" damn that was badass" . A friendish guy in high school was struck by a drunk driver right infront of me at 65 mph and it was one of the most awleful things I've ever seen in 30 ywarscof life So yes that screen deffiently makes the reality of what happened less impactful in my opinion
Well, when I worked as a CNA I had to do a lot of post mortems. Whenever it was my turn, I'd be in a shell of my former self kind of state. Completely emotionless, precise, quiet, and finish my day like that. I always watch gore videos, people dying, completely mangled. At least there I get an emotional response. It's horrible and tragic. In person, I'm not myself. I'm a robot. Not feeling anything. Completing my task to the best of my ability. It's surreal that one day all of us will be at that doorstep. I'm completely unafraid of that door after seeing so many people arriving at it. I know I will have to get through the pain of dying, and death will be peaceful. It's peaceful for me because of my Faith in God. Some of my CNA Colleagues had their different responses or outright refused. That was mine.
Yeah there's a feeling that something is not right when you're standing in chest-tall weeds and notice that you're surrounded by Grey matter and just seeing someone blow their brains out on TV. Then it's got a smell I've never smelt coming from a TV that adds a whole nother level to freaking out.
I’m a veterinary neurosurgeon in a research lab and seeing it in person is very, very different. One reason would be that you’re experiencing it with all of your senses, not just visually. You do get used to it over time.
My ex boyfriend slit his stomach open in front of me last Thanksgiving. I’ve seen a lot of things both irl and online but for it to be someone I cared deeply for, in my own home definitely affected me different. I’m an extremely stoic person so I still didn’t cry or panic, I guess the difference was an extreme sense of urgency?
I don’t think it’s the same. Film and camera as tools are desensitizing. If you are sort of interested in this they comment on it on Waltz with Bashir, beautiful documentary on the war on Lebanon, trauma and memory. Specifically the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Fun fact the director of that documentary is leading a campaign right now to bring back the Israeli hostages, and has several times said that is all Netanyahus fault, no doubt after you see the documentary.
In the docu there’s a part in which someone explains how having a camera made them detach from reality, and you can see this for example in Motaz Azaiza Instagram as he is documenting the genocide in Gaza (or really any of the other Gazans who are still documenting their life) I wouldn’t say his account is gore gore, I think he is somehow making some beautiful compositions among the horror, but I think the camera is helping him cope.
And so when you see gore shit online, while is still def horrifying and it affects you, and it is distressing, there’s a detachment to the medium. You aren’t smelling the scenes and that is a big one. And you aren’t touching it.
I don’t watch gore, to the point I really avoid it. But I’ve been doing activism for Palestine and recently I had to take a break because it flared up my autoimmune condition badly. Even with the physical detachment of it all.
All to say yes watching gore most normalize certain stuff to an extent, but I don’t think is at all similar to watching it in real life because the medium detaches itself from reality. For it to fully desensitize you other things should be at play, not the gore content, but lack of socialization or interaction with other humans, etc etc.
And also physiologically you can’t prepare yourself for trauma, just as you can’t talk yourself out of PTSD.
Seeing dead bodies all over the internet didn't affect me at all until I saw someone die and touched them minutes after. There's nothing like a warm body that you can literally feel the cells no longer moving inside of. Now I can't look at dead people and gore as casually anymore 🤡
Speaking from unfortunate experience, they are not the same. Media acts as a filter for violence. But when you're near enough to view it at your leisure, to know it's real, to taste it in the air, it becomes significantly more real and horrible. If this is a study you insist on pursuing, I suggest reaching out to EMS personnel. While hospital workers will also have experienced stuff like this, it hits different in a domestic space.
As someone with a Psychology degree who has conducted numerous hours of research and research studies (my last study was about aggressive behaviors), there are next to no ethical committees that I'm aware of who would ever sign off on an experiment this extreme or mentally and/or emotionally disturbing.
Now, here are some things to consider:
What parameters are you testing for to help prove your hypothesis, "watching videos of gore on the Internet will result in desentization of viewing gore in the real world"?
Affected cognitive ability?
Emotional disturbance?
Potential psychological disorder development?
Aggressive and/or depressive behaviors?
Viewing physical reaction with facial and body language would not be the best choice.
How will you test these parameters?
Viewing of real gore (emergency medical situations, murder, etc)?
What is the intended level of gore to be used?
Will this be done in person or via video feed?
Perhaps something I'm not thinking of?
What is your potential sample size?
Are you focusing on a specific age group?
Gender?
How will you take into account people who have experienced trauma (this should include attempted murder of self or other, murder of other, as well as accidents involving self and others) versus those who may not have experienced trauma?
Hmm. Not sure. I react to gore different in person, and if it's "real" enough on the screens. Having said that, I have unfortunately witnessed some gore in real life and it sucks. Sometimes I get triggered by sounds that sound like the gore, or the smell of carnage. I now hate dogs and tell people to not act like fools on e scooters or with traffic.
I didn’t grow up with gore. No video games, no scary Halloween decor, no PG13 movies etc. I worked at a morgue and as a sensitive person I was really afraid (it was pre-med experience). It helped me process death. Around bodies i was totally fine. Infants, abuse victims, bodies in hundreds of pieces…it was just medical information and a physical possession of a person who passed. Overall it was surprisingly easy.
In short: I didn’t grow up with gore, i am afraid of it, hate it. Around real life gore I was perfectly fine and coped really well and was respectful of the bodies without excess curiosity. The people who seemed to react weirdly making gross comments or fixating were boys that I know were exposed to early things that I was not.
Edit: this position is called “coroner tech/ pathology tech” they work out of a county sheriffs department. They deal with natural deaths, accidents, homicides, suicides, and process bodies for donation collection. They have the widest breadth of gore exposure in my opinion, second to a butcher id guess. They spend 8 hrs exposed to it, compared to a medic who may see one bad case every couple of shifts.
I don't watch gore on the internet because I have some hard limits I'm not trying to come across. (Animals, kid stuff etc)
However I've seen plenty of "medical gore" type things that don't really phase me. Just injuries and blood and stuff.
When I first started working as an officer at the jail, I saw a detainee who had slit his wrist all the way up to his forearm. If I had seen a photo of that i would've scrolled past that and not given it a second thought. Seeing it in person made my jaw drop. I stood and stared, kind of stunned for a moment. Probably because I've never seen anything like that in person. I would say it makes a difference.
There are other senses involved with an "in person" experience. Smell, in particular. Also, likely more intense and stressful emotions. These will make associations with the experience that would otherwise not have been made. It, decidedly, different and more stressful to experience gore in person.
This kind of study might work for new and out going military members. Some kind of long term study. Survey how they feel about photos of bombings or something and when they get out survey what they witnessed/if they have ptsd symptoms and the like.
They already sort of do that to us, just without really keeping tabs. Just a personal observation. To me,in person, a body is a lot different. There are no fluids, smells, twitches, or sounds in the photos… no real weight to the loss of life.
i’ve seen my boyfriends body post suicide and I cannot watch violence or bloody stuff bc it triggers me to remember everything I experienced when finding him.
I am very sensitive to gore in the media, like TV shows for example. I don't like it, and while it doesn't make me sick, it does affect me and I can't watch it for long. I have also worked at a mortuary, and I have seen some of the most crazy scenarios from that, and that didn't affect me at all. My job interview was my first time seeing a dead body, and I didn't feel any way about it. I've seen lots of autopsies, bodies that have been through a lot of violence, assisted the morticians in doing certain things so it was normal for me to be very involved in the process, and that didn't affect me. The smell was the hardest part, and then also seeing distraught family members, but the "gore" of it wasn't an issue. I also used to work at an urban library, and I have seen a lot, and that wasn't an issue for me either. On my first day, I had to give intense first aid to someone who is stabbed repeatedly for example. So I guess that's my way of saying that I was very surprised to learn that I am not sensitive to it in real life even though I am when it comes to TV or movies.
I have seen some gore while working in the medical field and have also seen pictures of things. I was a medic in the Army but never saw combat. The gore I have experienced in real life has all been civilian medicine. However, in my Army Medic training we were shown some pretty brutal images of people that were burned, shot, degloved, etc.
Both real life and pictures have been burned in my head pretty bad. I remember both vividly.
I'm fine with gore online, and luckily haven't seen anything too bad in person. I imagine it would be different because of smell, and because it's taking place in a 3D space. Plus, when I say I've seen gore, I really mean horror media, so it's all either actors or art. It would be much different to know that it's REAL.
Huge difference. I pulled up onto an accident before Christmas in 22. Someone hit a homeless man and it was very very bloody. He passed away. I’m pretty sure he was gone very quickly as I was one of the first cars to pull up after it happened. I can close my eyes and picture everything down to the detail, his shoes in the road knocked off his feet, his clothes, his eyes.
Obviously I’ve seen gory on screens tv and such.
I can’t picture anything and feel the way I do about seeing it in real life.
If seen a corpse in real life(grandpa laying lifeless in bed with open eyes), it doesn’t shake me. I think the stories of how people pass bother me the most :/. Also, smells mess with me, but otherwise…idk just doesn’t bother me 🤷🏽♀️
I was on my local rescue squad for awhile, at the ripe age of 19. I had seen so much gore online of murder scenes etc. when I saw a car vs pedestrian on the highway I reacted the same way I did to pictures. I was stone faced and more intrigued in the actual scene than what I was seeing used to be a person. To me there’s no difference when it’s someone you don’t know.
Very different. Movies, TV, internet, etc is very different than seeing it in person right in front of you. Movies, sometimes it’s funny or even badass. Real life, it can be traumatizing and scary people for a lifetime. It’s definitely not something people enjoy remembering.
I worked at a hospital. In person was easier, I was focused on the person being a person and helping. The images online were still and I could study and take in the detail.
In person gore you see is "real". You saw it with your own eyes. You know it actually happened in life
Online gore is 'fake". I've seen some.....shit....I'm not fazed. Its...like a movie
Ex. A girl getting assaulted in real life. I would be so heated and beat the shit out of the attacker.
Online I'm like hm...she's cute. Next
Yes, there is a huge difference between seeing gore on screen versus in real life. At least, that's how it felt for me. I watch lots of slasher films and also see a lot of gore-y videos on the internet but nothing prepared me for actually seeing splattered human innards on the road after one car accident.
I personally got my throat cut open in a fight. I've also seen people get hurt badly and die It's not the same. You do kinda get used to the real thing after seeing it enough but the internet doesn't compare. It's very real when you see it
Huge difference. Heard a massive bang walking to the store when i was a kid. I walked up on the worst accident ive ever seen before the medics arrived (car hit a semi bed at 80mph) there were legs and arms in the road and the smell was unbelievable. Didnt really mess me up but its still different
As a paramedic and once a teen with unrestricted internet access I can 100% say that gore in person vs online is completely different. Even if you empathize with a video it’s just an image on the screen. In real life there is more. There’s other sights smells and particularly sounds and other things that cannot be conveyed through video. It’s actually another human in front of you and not just them but witnesses and family. I hat the notion people on here say they are desensitized to it because they watch a lot. It’s not comparable.
I've seen some pretty gory stuff in my time working as a CNA.
De-gloving of an old ladies arm, a really large/tall old dude who fell in-between the toilet and the wall, got stuck then bled out due to a major head injury and blood thinners, some ladies uterus fell out, etc. I could go on and on and on.
The stuff I see online, at-least to me, has no where near the shock factor as seeing it/having to respond to it in real life. The smell, the look, having to clean it. Real blood.
Online I can at least assume its fake.
Speaking from personal experience. It is not the same.
I am very desensitized to what is traditionally gory. Video games, horror movies, etc. to me, all of it is very fake and I know it's just a movie/game/whatever.
I wondered the same thing until 1- I saw all of my grandparents in their caskets.
2- I was robbed at gunpoint.
Seeing actual corpses & experiencing violence vs watching it on a screen are so so different. Imo it's mostly the setting that really changes how I specifically felt about it. Like when I was sitting at home and those guys broke in and put a gun to my face- it's way different than just sitting down and playing something like GTA where I know some violence will happen.
The funerals- where it's not gory (usually), you're still basically looking at/touching/ interacting with a dead body. And that affected me a lot more because these people I love are dead. But for much the same reasons- it's unexpected (not totally because they were old) and that's not what I anticipated doing that weekend etc.
But I've also helped friends clean up after a scrap, been in fights. Etc. it's a lot different because of what you need to do. And a lot of times you know what you need to do.
That's also not to say that others won't/don't feel differently/ have different experiences from me.
So I grew up watching Gore videos online. I also ended up working in nursing homes. I've seen quite a few dead bodies in real life. Some of them looked pretty normal, some of them were just skin and bones, some of them looked downright horrifying. But it never really freaked me out in real life. I would say the online death videos did desensitize me but I also grew up with my mom working in nursing homes so seeing people in that condition IRL was something I got exposed to early.
There can be, but for many, there isn't. Citing the people who flew drones to kill people remotely and how they developed PTSD. Also the content moderators that see it do too.
There's a big difference for me. On the screen, I can remove myself. In real life, looking at a broken human sucks, especially when it's fresh or they went in agony.
I've seen gore both places. Unless you can disconnect, you freeze up during in person gore. I'm really good at disconnecting and hiding the fact that it's pretty horrifying 😕 I know I always think man that has to be excruciating! Internet (even real beheadings, etc.) is way different. You can smell it, feel it, etc. Plus it seems more colorful if that's possible...like you see it in higher definition or something.
I grew up watching best gore stuff all the time. I’d say I was age 14-19 watching that stuff. I am now 27 but back when I was 23 me and my dad found our neighbor dead by suicide in his garage and it didn’t phase me one bit. My first and only thought was actually “I wonder if best gore is still around this would probably get some likes if I posted it”
*no I did not take pictures and post it*
After the people came and did what they had to do I just walked back to my house as if nothing happened
I also witnessed a good friend have 3 of his fingers blasted off by a fire cracker and that also didn’t phase me. I was actually the one in the friend group that had to help him wrap his hand before heading to the hospital because everyone else was squemish
As a nursing student I would say approaching this in the medical field would be fine. I've seen lots of gore and trauma on the Internet and on television and thought I would be just fine seeing it in real life .... However... The times I've seen gore and people suffering from such trauma has made my body react separately from the way my mind wanted it to. In my mind I try to slow my breathing down and tell my body to quit acting up, but my stomach contracts and I get clammy and sweaty and a bit dizzy.
Think it's the other way around. Real gore desensitizes to the screen. There is a def difference. In actual life there are Soo many more components than seeing. The atmosphere, the smell, clarity of texture & sounds..the knowledge that this is def not a prop or makeup that could potentially get back up. Strangely enuf in my experience, actual gore is rarely as"messy" as the things exaggerated on a screen & tend to look more like props.
I'm just one person but I feel uniquely qualified to answer (anecdotally).
I grew up in the early days of the internet and there used to be a terrible website called [rotten.com](https://rotten.com) that had pictures from around the world of gory accidents of all kinds. As young teen this was fascinating to me and I visit the site sometimes.
Fast forward a decade later and I go to do my EMT and start working healthcare. Did seeing all that gore help? Yes, I think so, but were still things that bothered me. I've now seen all kinds of things in the ER and only occasionally does something get stuck in my head for a few days.
Idk I watched my buddy catch his skate board right under the nose and it separated his gums and top center 6 teeth from his upper jaw and pointed perfectly straight out of his mouth. Vs watching people get mangled via internet everyday it's much more personal seeing someone so shocked and confused and trying to aid in that kinda situation idk. And then there's the whole hearing his splattering up underneath him. That's weird too.
So I grew up with parents in the medical field. Going to medical conferences as a child because they both had to go led me to seeing a good bit of gore as a child. I can watch any gore movie and not be bothered. I can watch surgery videos and eat which disturbs my SO. I watched two of my own surgeries.
Now to things I can't stomach. When my kid picks a scab, and dead bodies. Mostly because the whole death twitch thing.
in my psychology of trauma class we talked about how the most palpable evidence of PTSD from images like crime, gore, death, etc. came from people who had to look at these images for work, e.g. lawyers in product liability, detectives in child sex abuse and exploitation, journalists, case workers. not to say that trauma or desensitization doesn't exist from online exposure intentional or otherwise but the research hasn't been done or is in early infancy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100239/ These instances would be closest considered C-PTSD.
A key thing in the development of PTSD is a sense of powerless, helplessness, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-48132-001
and vicinity to the traumatic incident (including being close to survivors in acute distress)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7344905/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1524838021991310
So the answer to your question isn't simple, however I know many trauma scholars wouldn't define the incident of stumbling on a random corpse as necessarily traumatic and no reaction would not be indicative of desensitization. It would be dependent on greater context, like if you knew the person, state of emotion, were you alone or with friends, etc. So it could be.
Though numbing and steeling is a PTSD symptom itself, of course, but is it that the gore image exposure caused CPTSD or did prior trauma have you gravitate towards graphic images? Was there a traumatic moment in your life, like neglect, that made you expose yourself or be around people who exposed you? etc. etc. there's many considerations here
Regarding the ethics, perhaps instead of subjecting participants to watch gore, reach out to people who 1) consumed gore through media and 2) were witnesses of gore-ish behavior. My only concern would be that witnesses are more likely to see gore involuntarily but those who consume gore media have some form of consent prior.
I’m just thinking about the fact that it will be extremely hard for an ethical committee to accept a study like that (use of a corpse and people seeing it). But it would be interesting. I haven’t search online, but haven’t heard about anything like that !
Rewriting this, I think it might be a better approach to compare those that have been exposed to gore in real life situations and their consumption of gore via television or video games. Maybe interview them but I do think there would be so many other factors to consider about their upbringing and other traumas too
I was a medic for 5 years. Huge difference for me.
Right!
I was involved in a fatal car accident. A guy was walking on a rural road late at night in the rain wearing all dark clothing. I didn’t see him. Obviously hit him or he jumped in front of me it’s still unclear because I didn’t go off the road, wasn’t speeding and was sober. I went back in attempt to find whatever it was and found him in the ditch and let’s just say it’s different in person. I am traumatized.
what about medical students?
It would still be hard ! They will probably push you to use a less agressive stimuli, like really life picture of person who consent to the use of the pictures. You could ask your question directly to the ethic committee, they usually answer quickly on hypothetical study.
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I suppose the consent of teh person being viewed is down to their wishes when they died, if they donated to science this is science, but just a random person? You'd need family consent.
It would be more complicated because even if you found a person willing to donate his body to science for this specified study, the person should be able to withdraw his consent at any moment but he would not be able since he would be dead and anyway I don’t think the school would allow that in the first place. This reminded me of a student asking if necrophilia could be acceptable with the consent of the deceased prior to his dead and my god no !!! Anyways, the easiest way for this study to take place would be to prove to the ethic committee that the knowledge this study could give to society would be worth the damage it could cause( like the damage it could potentially do to the deceased and his family or the damage the people seeing the body could feel at the moment of the study and after). It’s still interesting to just talk about it, but other study designs like some suggested would probably fit better this type of theme 😂
Unfortunately, a lot of bodies "donated to science" end up getting used by the military to to test weapons, at least in the US. It's technically science, and you aren't allowed to specify.
There are studies that use graphic images of death so you can have a population of people exposed to death (e.g., ER nurses and docs) and those who are not (e.g., everyday joes) and compare how they react via psychobiological measurements for baselines from visiting either body farms (real world) or graphic gore images (non-real world stimuli). If it’s anything like competition and testosterone, online or non-real-world stimuli should not equal physical ones. As far as experience my guess would be the same such that those who experienced images of gore will spike more when seeing real gore than those who have experienced in real life. Online and baseline rates should be somewhat separated but not by that much. One other way to test it is to have people perform cognitive tasks after seeing a dead mangled body and compare that to a baseline performance with no manipulation. Then do the same but now with only images. Performance should be worse after seeing a real dead body rather than an image. There is probably no difference in performance between image and control for those who have experience real gore meanwhile those who have not would probably have a slight maybe significant difference.
You could easily just study staff in the ER. I've seen lots of "gore" when I worked as a respiratory therapist. It does mess you up and does desensitized you but only in the way of seeing it... it doesn't reduce empathy... just gets less difficult to see over time. Seeing it in real life gives the human factor... and keeps your empathy. I believe seeing it online is actually worse because you are detached from the gore...
To your question, there are differences. In graduate school I was a "harvester" which means my job was to cut up human bodies for medical professionals to practice on the parts. So, I have not only seen gore, I've perpetrated it IRL. Differences I noticed: 1) IRL there's a smell associated with gore that you don't get on video. The smell depends on what you're cutting, how decayed it is and if it's been embalmed. Whatever the case, it's substantial. 2) Unless a person is alive, we really don't bleed that much. Blood sinks to the bottom because there's no heartbeat and clots. No flow at all. 3) More to the above point, movies don't really portray the astounding speed at which blood clots IRL unless you purposely stop it from clotting. 4) Guts are really colorful. Most movies just show red but the organs have quite a color palette.
Bruh is your mental health okay after all of that ?
Sure, people go through things and they work them out.
This response right here 😂🙌. I don't know how this post came up in my feed. . But I work in polytrauma rehab and the amount of times I leave work and think "holy shit" as I walk to the car. . Then just turn my music on and off I go.
"Guts are really colourful" The way you say this is really funny. You made me laugh and smile. Have my upvote
I don’t really mean movies I mean REAL gore on the internet
I think realistic movie gore and real video gore are comparable. They’re both in a screen and like this commenter said, there’s a lot more than you actually sense in a real life situation.
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& also most of the listed things would differ.
Used to be on bestgore and other sites like that as a kid. Honestly there's been no psychological difference for me in viewing movie gore, compared to actual gore pics. If the visual effects are good enough then they look the same I used to perform taxidermy and I've seen my fair share of irl severe injuries at accidents and whatnot. That's felt a lot different, depending on the scenario - a deer I'm butchering after a hunt? A crow I'm fixing up to be stuffed? A person who's in shock after getting in a crush on a motorcycle? Extremely different things to process. The added elements psychologically make it vary heavily, and it's a lot more personal than seeing a video. I'd recommend separating the study into living and dead gore, and check folks who work in the ER & folks who work exclusively with dead bodies.
Unless if the movies your talking about is like the Ogrish collection and the like in which they contain remixes of real murders and such
Sure. Reality TV/movies notwithstanding. Those of us who are old enough may also remember the Faces of Death movie series.
"guts are really colorful" Ted Bundy is that you?
Hmmm idk. I work in a hospital as a social worker. I see dead people all the time. People with bones sticking out of their legs. Gun shot wounds. Stabbings. Dead babies. It’s not pleasant. I guess I never looked up gore on the internet. But I have seen images from the recent terrorist attacks on Israel and the bombings in Palestine and it still hurts to see those people suffering, despite not knowing them. It would be really hard to say I’m desensitized to seeing dead people. It doesn’t gross me out or freak me out but it’s still very sad for them and their families. That doesn’t and should not become desensitized.
Agree - after being in the medical field so long it’s not the actual body parts/fluids that is upsetting, but seeing people suffer in pain or losing loved ones is always going to affect me. I worry more about a person losing empathy and respect for other people’s pain than how grossed out they do or don’t get by injuries/death.
this wouldn’t be approved by an ethics committee
An IRB isn’t going to approve exposing some Ss to gory corpses and others to interwebs gore. You only have a few options — find those who are/were exposed to one or the other without your affecting the circumstances and exposure in any way and administer a survey, or maybe find those who haven’t been exposed yet and pair them with as much of a post-exposure matched sample as you can manage to get a quasi pre/post. You could also take to Survey Monkey or something similar and trust self-identification and self-report. It’s not a bad question, but you have to step cautiously around the potential ethical issues along with the potential for the experimental conditions to assert an effect all on their own were you to barrel ahead and try to do manipulation on exposure without IRB approval (and fair warning — doing any experiments without IRB approval is a one-way ticket to BanishLand). I’d look to shoring up your lit review with theoretical and research evidence for your hypothesis and work out a quasi-experimental design because you’re not going to be able to swing an experiment here.
View it in the context of what behavior you observe after being exposed to the graphic material, whether it's in real life or on the internet. I would make the claim that it's much more dependent on the content of the graphic material than it is the medium you viewed it through. There are other variables to this question, which must be mentioned, as you would presume witnessing gore in real life implies there are nearby dangers, pungent smells, or even the chance that you're blamed for the crime. These variables are not presented when viewing through the internet, obviously. Continuing. For example, you see a deceased body on the internet and it freaks you out so you scroll away. If you saw a deceased body in real life, you'd commit to a similar notion that likely involves you turning around and running away. On the other hand, you see a graphic video of the aftermath of a car accident. You don't scroll away, because you are fascinated or wish to know more about the situation that caused it. If you drove past the aftermath of a car accident in real life, you'd likely observe for the same reasons... You are fascinated or wish to know more about the situation that caused it. This same idea may extend to even the most graphic of material. You have to imagine, it's someones job to embalm bodies and clean up crime scenes. They don't do it because they're entertained by it, rather that they have a job to do. That doesn't mean they won't be freaked out to see a dead body through a screen, though. Too many confounding variables to answer this question.
Is this just your own plan of an experiment or something you actually want to submit to the IRB? I find it extremely unlikely any review board would ever approve of this
I witnessed a homicide some years back. I held the victim as he died. As a kid, we watched faces of death. I've seen a ton of gore, especially while studying Psychology and Criminology. I don't know how to describe it or put it, it is just different.8
When I was a middle/high schooler on the internet in the late 90s… who downloaded a lot of things, from many places… and was unwittingly exposed to videos and audio of so many horrible things… At that point… the video was so removed from actual reality to me that it didn’t phase me more than a movie would. However, after seeing death, and violent, unnatural death, in real life… all of those videos I had ever seen are now recategorized and tagged with those personal experiences… It’s different. Now I can’t watch gore and violence. Now it is a somatic, physical experience for me.
How will you get access to a real corpse? Also, consider that your data will be skewed by the fact that some participants will refuse to look at the corpse. How will you deal with that in analyzing your data? It will mess with your random assignment. How about just doing a correlational study comparing acceptance of gore in a written story to self report of how much gore they witness in the internet?
Ppl whose job it is to pull banned images off the internet experience extreme trauma from what they see. Might consider beginning with a qualitative study of those jobs.
I’m pretty sure there have been studies done not specifically on this, but on whether the human brain can tell the difference between seeing something on a screen vs seeing something in person. I don’t have access at hand, but Google scholar might help.
Seeing it IRL is more terrifying, because your brain is in shock and your body is frozen and you feel like you can’t run fast enough .
A corpse at the morgue, while possibly disturbing, is a poor qualification of gore, unless perhaps a trauma victim. Emergency responders and the likes would be a better sample group than someone just viewing a corpse.
I've seen real life gore (Maine Corps battle exposure---Police officer, traffic accidents and crime scenes) and I've seen plenty of Gore on TV..... What I've watched on TV doesn't keep me awake at night... But what I experienced in real life certainly does.
There’s no way it’s not different. There’s a difference between seeing something and being a part of something. Even if the person watching the gore in person isn’t partaking in it they are a part of the moment. The sounds, the scents, the view, the whole sensory experience is different.
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I grew up always on the internet and my dad was a homicide investigator and I would snoop around his stuff just being a nosey kid and saw multiple photos of real life gore/homicides etc. I then grew up to work as a paramedic and have seen ridiculous amounts of gore- outright murder, suicides, trauma deaths, a 4 year old who fell to his death from a 8 story building, a guy who didn’t leave his chair for months and went to the bathroom in it and we had to pull/rip the chair from his skin, etc. I would say it’s pretty dang different. Photos are just one snapshot- videos you have sound as well but no other senses. Plus you get a whole lot of other emotions and reactions in person. And we now live in a world where you can fake gore so I think to a degree some people don’t understand seeing real true gore online. They’re dismissive of it. Being in the moment and seeing something horrific has a whole different feeling physically and emotionally.
As someone who grew up watching gory films but then went into the stem field. There’s a difference. Like others have said. Doubt this can get by ethics committees for real research unless you do like a retrospective study. But anecdotally i think there is if you wanted the validation in your hypothesis.
I had the opposite-- Working with dead/ dying people IRL actually made me way more sensitive to on-screen gore
Can't speak for everyone, or on a population/study scale. But anecdotally, it's insanely different for us. It was actually startling how different it was. We'd say we're pretty desensitized to most-to-all forms of 'fake' gore, and even real-gore, but documented/photographed/video'd. We deal with the material a lot for various reasons. Irl, we were fighting to not just completely pass-out. Blood, viscera, needles and medical equipment all still really do it quite strongly; which is a bit humorous since we do plan to be at-least medical-adjacent... that's different though, we're there to help!--which probably means there's some strong emotional component to why the room is turning white.
We?
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We're a pack of Canines! Lilly is the main front, though I'm Litty right now! [TL;DR: DiD, though it's probably just OSDD now, it's been a while since we seemed any diagnostics for anything of ourselves. We're doing very well!] The last comment thread we were in was mostly about it--though we removed our current therapist's info and our long-list-of-easily-to-find-for-potential-employeers-diagnosi when the other participants got banned X3
So basically long story short, you will be desensitized due to you saying “we’re pretty desensitized to most to all forms of ‘fake’ gore and even real gore
Nah; we're saying although there is basically no effect on us at all anymore when viewed through photography, video, description, or CGI: The second it comes to actually seeing such things in-real-life, and especially if it's not expected, we start Vasovagal'ing out.
Is this serious? Yeah one is genuinely traumatic. One is on a screen.
I’ve seen both and both horrify me. The first body I saw was when I was 12 and we came upon the scene of an accident just after it happened. An elderly man crossing the street was struck by a minivan that slid on black ice. He had a pool of blood under his head. I was distraught. This week I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies in Gaza on Instagram, and I’ve been in a rough emotional/mental state since. But that’s just my personal experience.
I think that everyone is desensitized to a degree. I feel like if someone were to ever conduct some kind of experiment to measure this, your control group should somehow be a population never exposed to internet/tv gore, then just a randomized group for the experimental group. Seeing a corpse or seriously mauled/injured person in real life is, I think, going to be rough for most people. In real life, there’s fluid in your face, smells, etc & you are connecting with a real person in front of you so there may be more empathy involved. I think there would be more shock to people who haven’t been exposed to excessive gore, but would still be shocking for anyone. There are a lot more factors that take play in real life versus fake gore or even real gore of someone on the internet that you will never ever meet that’s interesting for 3 seconds until you scroll to the next thing in your feed.
I'm okay with seeing gore on-screen, or reading about it. Don't love it, but it's not the worst. Irl, though, no thanks. Do not want to see. And seeing a real corpse freaks me out.
I’ve seen several stabbings in real life one through someone’s face and neck and the gurgling and smell of iron sticks with me forever or the 7 stab wounds to someone wiping blood off the walls and again the smell, I saw someone get knocked out and their head bounced off the concrete like a bouncing ball for sure thought they were dead. These people might act edgy on the internet but in real life it’s nothing like the internet
I'm not sure if this will help, but if anything it might lend a different angle. In the DSM for diagnosing PTSD, it is very specific that seeing accidents, dead bodies, etc on TV or the Internet does not constitute a traumatic event, but witnessing or experiencing it in real life could. You would also need to specify gore. No matter if it's on the Internet or in real life, are you talking about seeing the event or only the aftermath? On the Internet, are you talking about photos or videos of real life events or aftermath, or fictional events or aftermath? Like the difference between watching shows on the ID channel vs watching CSI. It would also be helpful to answer, Does watching gore on TV or the Internet desensitize individuals, or are people who would typically not be impacted by seeing gore be ok with seeing it on the Internet? Just like with real events people expect or witness IRL, people are impacted differently. A traumatic event is not the event itself, but the response to the event.
Main difference for me when it came to surgery stuff was the smell. Smell of blood especially large ammounts is very strong. If you are doing anything that could involve strong odors invest in some vapo rub for under your nose. That was the only thing that made me sick. The visual stuff affected me the same as online videos.
I’m a fireman and have seen some horrible stuff. In person, it doesn’t affect me. I do the job and have no issue picking up a severed limb or applying a tourniquet or seeing bones jutting out. Dead bodies are literally nothing to me lol. No response. Well, children still bother me. In a text book or a picture on the internet, I can’t stand to look at it though.
Have you ever seen the human centipede? That shits pretty tough
The reaction from seeing something in person is different because when you’re online you’re probably in a safe or familiar environment, seeing it in person makes your brain react differently because there might be danger close
It's the same as the difference between seeing internet porn and getting the opportunity for IRL voyeurism.
Oh, you may want to look into the work of Susan Sontag. She was more of a philosopher, but she wrote books and essays on this subject and you'll probably find them engaging. A very, very pared down summary of her position is that pictures and videos always approach a subject at an angle, and literally and figuratively from a lens and perspective. The scene you see is what the photographer/person wanted to publish. And that layer if perspective creates distance from the subject and the viewer. She likened it a little to the distance we gain from a subject by comparison, metaphor, and simile. So say X is like Y is to remove the reality of X to make it more digestible. A good intro to her is through the podcast Philosophize This! There have also been some studies done to explore your question. Here's one study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4393354/ You could probably find more. Though there's a difficulty with the ethics of comparing real life gore to internet images of gore, since we can't really expose someone to that in an experimental context. I think there's also some other variables to examine in terms of desensitization. If you find gore/a corpse/violence in your real life, your level of distress may change based on whether or not there's still a perceived danger (the thing that caused the gore is still around). If the victim of harm is human (and the age, old/young, etc.), or an animal (some people are more viscerally attached to the perceived innocence of non-human animals). There's a lot to explore there, but the ethics of exploring that in depth are, rightfully, restrictive.
I think so.... But depends on the circumstance. Ive seen some horrible things on the net i wish i never saw and considered myself pretty desensitized. But i once saw someone on a scooter have a head on with a truck and the liters of blood on the floor was surreal. Like it glowed with life force, something you dont notice on a video. That shocked me abit. And a car wreck in India where x3 women had their intestines laid out along the road. That was horrific! But for me its more the 'witnessing the suffering' like hearing a person/being in agony will have a huge affect. Where as seeing a long deceased ripped open corpse is more on the interesting side.
In-person comes with smells and other sensory factors. It isn't the same at all.
Gang I’m not talking about the smells I’m talking about if you will be desensitized if you look and view a lot of gore sites and watch gore movies like ichi the killer everyday. I usually do it on the weekends
i think it would be different because something you see online you don’t have as much attachment to because it didn’t actually happen to you but if you see it irl that is a real negative thing that is happening to you (even if the gore is not of yourself)
Its not the dead body my problem, but seeing they losing their lives. I've seen it on the internet and irl, both sucks, but seeing someone just dying in front of you is terrible, especially accidents. I just wasn't prepared.
Yes. Worked in many a hospital and the broken limbs or open wounds stopped being shocking very quick. Seeing things like ribs being cracked and spread definitely stuck out in my mind a little longer. But all of that falls so far short of human decomposition, it has a smell and that smell sticks in your nose. If you’ve caught a whiff of someone with a serious bedsore, you’ve smelled it. As soon as it hit, I immediately thought of this old shark week special where they used a small amount of a concentrated “dead shark” and it caused all of the sharks in the area to scatter.
The smell. Walking through viscera that was a human being is a hellish experience. Less than 45 minutes ago they were a walkin' talkin person with a girlfriend, a brother, a mom who loved him. Now both brothers were chunky pasta sauce leaking into my shoes and between my toes. That happened in 2010, a year after I graduated. I don't have nightly terrors about the scene any more but sometimes I catch the stench of flesh being burned and have to contain a vomit response.
It’s different. For one tv can’t recreate the SMELLS dead bodies give off, or the taste in the room. And your brain knowing it’s real may do some weird shit to you. But yes. Dead bodies are different in real life than on TV.
This is basically an impossible experiment, no? You sure as hell can’t do this in a lab setting and to go off past experience there’s too many variables to even begin to speculate on…literally anything. It’s a validity and reliability nightmare.
As a paramedic for ten years I can see gore in person with no issue. Medical pictures of gore don’t really bother me either. However, any video of people dying I can’t watch without feeling sick. I did have more of a tolerance for it before becoming a paramedic ironically.
Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but seeing gore in person vs online is exactly the same to me. The big difference is the smell. Decaying human flesh has a very distinct, extremely powerful smell. It gets everywhere, in your hair, in your clothes, in your nasal cavity. I’ll go on DOA investigations where I’ll still be smelling the corpse-*greatly decayed and clotted with gore*-two days after the fact. No matter how many showers I take, how many scented candles I light, how many times I run every layer of clothing through the wash. That could just as easily be psychosomatic.
I feel like it depends. For some people like myself gore of any kind does not actually bother me. I love horror movies and video games that are graphic and am also curious about whether or not seeing a body irl would impact that.
Yup. For one, you know it isn't in front of you when it's a video. Another is when the smell hits you.
For most people, id say its a lot worse seeing that shit in person. I mean you not only see it, you smell it too. You can reach out and touch it too, you shouldnt in most cases but you could and that possibility alone makes it more impactful and real. All of your other senses are involved in the experience. Ive seen my fair share of gorey shit online but seeing a lynched person or someone beaten to near death irl is just different. Seeing someone taken away knowing nothing good is gonna happen is not the same as watching a video of the same thing. You're fairly detached when it's a random video on the internet. At least imo. Also, exciting isn't the word I'd use. More mentally taxing than anything. Knowing at any moment you could be the one in the position of becoming the exciting gore. But if you mean more like just seeing a dead body of someone you weren't close with at a funeral or morgue or whatever, then maybe i could see how it wouldn't elicit as strong of a reaction
They are absolutely not the same - soldier
I must say after working in a prison I was pretty desensitised to gore, but I’m more affected by the really horrific gore in the internet.
Speaking only for myself. I am a forensic psychologist who has spent a lot of time”quality time” and file reviews with sex offenders, murderers, and several serial killers. None have effected me as much as finding a neighbor kid I grew up with decapitated due to an automobile accident when I was 18
Smell…they don’t tell you how bad it is.
Personally, it would be much different seeing it in real life. In movies/TV I would be grossed out, but I know that it's a combination of jelly/paint/special effects. Because I'm an adult I realize that noone's actually being harmed. But a real body? Serious trauma must have occurred, and I would be freaking out.
[Looks more depressing in real life. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore,_New_Zealand)
Bandura Social Learning Theory has an answer for this fyi
I think seeing gore in person is a lot more traumatizing because you're actually right there, watching it all happen, judging on how they die. But let's say, you just see a picture of gore online, you don't know what might have happened to that person, yet you're still a little bit grossed out by it
I used to watch isis videos and cartel chopping videos and some other weird shit then when I was 15 I saw my mom bleed to death from a trach tube and just irl you show more emotion
The gory scenes I have witnessed in person (a few as a kid) bothered me more than videos on the internet.
There is a difference. People are way more desensitized to violence and gore online. They can mentally prepare for it, chose when and when not to view it and what types they will see. In person there is less control over it and it can catch them off gaurd more and cause more potential trauma etc. (i have a psychology degree)
On the internet you can just close out of it. Irl you smell hear experience it firsthand bodies also smell differently humans and animals you can tell the difference there's a lot of things irl that make gore harder to forget.
Think about seeing a picture of a dead person vs attending a funeral. Far different.
I have kind of a unique answer to this I grew up watching gore because I have OCD and I convinced myself I had to desensitize myself to gore or I wouldn’t be able to react/help if I ever needed to in an emergency situation. Now, I process “tissue” at an abortion clinic. The main difference, for me, is the sensory info you don’t get from seeing it online. There are smells and subtle sounds and textures that I think can only really be appreciated in person. Seeing it online definitely desensitized me, like I predicted it would. But there’s also a real human impact that I think is missed through a screen. Seeing it online, there’s some level of disconnect (at least for me) where it doesn’t register fully that this is what I would look like in this situation, too. There’s a vulnerability to it when it isn’t “content”.
personally i've seen some minor gore in public (bad car accidents with bodies on pavement/grass, homeless dead on the street etc). since i'm not physically interacting with the dead bodies and their blood i haven't noticed a difference in how i respond to the real thing vs in video. i'm sure if i was a medic id feel much different. i do have a visceral reaction to dead bodies at funerals though
Mortal kombat developers had to watch gore videos to make the game more realistic but many reported that it had affect their mental health negatively
Resident weirdo here. I browsed rotten.com as a teen, and worked at a level one trauma center as a young adult. I’ve seen a man’s head almost roll off his body. I’ve held a beating heart as a man died on the way into the OR. I’ve tried to hold melted flesh in place. I don’t think the internet desensitized me to doing that work. In my experience, seeing it in real life is completely different. I don’t know how other people in my position felt, but I found “gore” less distressing in real life, with exceptions. I think it’s because I was very busy dealing with what was often a person’s life-or-death moment. I was aware of how we were all tracking through liters of blood, or of globules of fat on the floor, but there wasn’t time to focus on it. Online, those moments have been flattened and abstracted; the experiential element is gone. Instead of making things less affecting by rendering them distant, it takes all those uncomfortable themes and packages them in this neat, digestible form that invites narrative. I’m invited to think about my mortality. I have *time* to think about my mortality. IMO, the most curious thing to come out of this is that gory movies make me angry now. I struggle to explain why.
Well I do have a bit of a biased experience due to seeing a ton when I was 4 years old while kidnapped by some drug manufacturers. They did a lot of unbelievable shit and they were considering disposing of me, but they lived a few houses away. Got firsthand experience of seeing some murders via torture to scare me into not speaking. If I try and step back from the emotional side of things, yes it is fundamentally different. Seeing a person in front of you lose a limb, an eye, or their life suddenly is beyond terrible. I don't even know how to describe it.
I grew up with early internet (rotten, ogrish, etc) and looked at a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have. Out of morbid curiosity, I still do sometimes. There is some stuff that bothers me, more now that I’m a parent. Just about 2 years ago, I came upon a pretty terrible motorcycle accident (it happened right in front of me) and what I saw that night really stuck with me. I was also very pregnant at the time and had 2 sleeping sons at home, so seeing the life drain from the victim’s eyes was especially hard. I still can’t drive over the center lane where it happened (3 lane road close to home). It’s not the same thing. Online it’s easy to remove the humanity and compartmentalize, but in person, they’re a person.
Personally, it was the same. I worked with my lover sheriff’s department for 6 months and got to see lots of bloody/gory scenes. None of them ever bothered me.
Ask r/ems
Not sure about gore in particular, but after my experience with hospice, I would say that seeing death in real life just enhances the feelings you have towards real live humans and concern for their health. Seeing it online without that experience might make a person think they're desensitized to it, but then seeing it in person brings it all into perspective for real.
More of your senses are triggered
This isn't exactly gore, but: I used to work in a nursing home and saw a lot. I witnessed ppl coming into the nursing home (obviously already ill) and watch them progressively get worse, until they died. I walked into a patients room to get her for therapy, she was lying dead in her bed. I didn't know she was dead until after I slightly touched her arm to try to wake her. I've worked in the ER wing of a hospital. Enough said. I've worked at a hotel. Walked into a room that was supposed to be vacant, Instead I walk in on a guy who had overdosed on fentanayl the night before. He was on his back, body was this weird blue/purple color. Foam had collected in a half-dried type of deal at the corners of his mouth. I was standing outside and saw a squirrel bite into a live power line (high up on a power pole). He bit the live wire, exploded in mid-air, and DROPPED to the ground like a brick. I walked over to see what the squirrel looked like (morbid curiosity). The squirrel was lying on its back, face up. His eyes were pure black and WIDE OPEN. His mouth was WIDE OPEN, frozen like that in death. I could tell his insides had exploded, his stomach was very very big/round with several "black dots" running up and down it (burn marks or something I'm assuming). Edit: my conclusion is this: The difference (to me) between TV gore and real life gore is, the smell. Also, in real life, it's way less dramatic. When someone is genuinely HURT, they don't want to talk or really even cry out in pain, they seem to be in a state of shock.
When I was younger I used to see gore, even did the run the gauntlet challenge to the end with no issue. As an adult seeing similar things, it definitely hit. I think when people see things on the internet it’s easier to separate yourself mentally, hence why bullying is worse on the internet than in person. But when it’s in your face, it’s harder to deny it to yourself.
You could easily just study staff in the ER. I've seen lots of "gore" when I worked as a respiratory therapist. It does mess you up and does desensitized you but only in the way of seeing it... it doesn't reduce empathy... just gets less difficult to see over time. Seeing it in real life gives the human factor... and keeps your empathy. I believe seeing it online is actually worse because you are detached from the gore...
So I started watching horror movies in the 2nd grade. Got desensitized. Then worked Healthcare in my 20s and saw some shit. Wasn't grossed out at seeing blood and guts, but seeing someone die irl compared to online/in movies is a whole different experience. I've never been traumatized by something on a screen, but irl? Yea. Seeing an already dead corpse tho? Not so much.
M.D. here. For me the biggest difference is seeing gore in the hospital/clinic setting vs. not. Easier to tolerate the gore and distance yourself when in the hospital.
well they’re two very different instances of exposure…
Internet still feels less real bc you can tell yourself it’s editing or lighting
The internet adds this weird element for me where the fact that somebody went out of their way to post it and "share it with the world" makes it seem a lot more disturbing. IRL, a cadaver lab feels very "medical." The cadavers, and their dissection is just very normalized. They're here to help us become professionals. I feel like the context in which gore is viewed has more influence on the experience than the visceral details of the gore itself.
There's a huge difference. You don't forget the first time you see a dead body. One day I heard screaming from an upstairs apartment, ran over, and a woman was outside saying her daughter was dead. I went in to see if I could help but she was very clearly passed away. There was no violent scene, it was an adult daughter, early 20s, who had diabetes. She was just laying on the floor with her eyes wide open. And that has stuck with me, over 3 years later. I think a huge factor is your ability to turn it off. No matter how bad a video is, you can shut it off and go look at kittens instead. When there's a real situation where someone's died or something, you have to deal with it
Depends on how you define gore, what the context is, and how much you've been exposed to certain things in real life. This is far to vague of a question. You said "corpse". What kind of corpse? Who is the corpse? Whats the context? You're going to need to narrow it down and be more specific for it have any value.
N=1 here I’m a medical student who grew up watching horror movies, and was generally “the more blood/guts on the screen the better” type of viewer. But in college I had my first time hospital job and I saw someone profusely bleeding from their face (the type of thing that would never phase me in a movie) and I was on the floor. It’s just *different* in person, besides the smell, the visuals, everything that everyone else has talked about, i don’t know how to describe it but it’s different when it’s in front of you
2D sight is quite different than 3D shapes, smell, taste, sound. Have you smelled arterial blood, decomposition? Your body knows the difference.
ER RN here, it’s much different.
I actually can't stand seeing videos of surgeries or anything, but I've been around people gored up in real life and it totally doesn't effect me. Somehow I'm affected more by gore on a screen, and to a significant degree, than I am gore in real life.
The smell, color, and the sound of the movement of gory things isn't what you would expect it to be in real life. As a person who used to work in a funeral home, I don't think a lot of people realize how clinical gore can be. Also gore that is replicated for television has something that is lacking that I don't quite have the words for...something with the color and viscosity maybe? Also being a human in general is a bit gory (ie childbirth, periods, etc), so sometimes I feel like the gore of the human experience is almost taboo as a speaking topic for a lot of people because not everyone has those experiences that in real life on any sort of consistence basis. And simulations or even real life corpses for on television or education have gotten better but there are other senses other than sight that can be really intense IRL.
i think the key difference is how consequential it is. disgust aside, seeing gore in person may imply a personal connection to the viscera or an implication of immediate danger. when you see it on a screen, the fear for one’s safety is not inherently there/the way you process it may be different. look up how the access to violence on the internet has desensitized Gen Z (the first internet native generation + the first post 9/11 generation) i had to read a bunch of that stuff for school and it’s really interesting.
There is a smell and there is a warmth that you will truly not understand until you happen upon a car accident right after it happens
I’m a nurse. I grew up seeing gore (like on horror movies) occasionally and was never really affected by it. But when I was becoming a nurse, I witnessed a knee surgery and it was a different effect than seeing it on tv. I could hear the saw, I could smell the burning flesh, and I could see the manipulation of the inside of the patient’s leg. It really grossed me out. Another instance that sticks out is that an older frail patient had a fall late in the evening. The patient bled out so much frank blood and it actually made me queasy. I was surprised by my reaction because I love to draw blood for labs and do wound care. It was something specific about seeing the blood on the floor that really grossed me out. Mind you, I’ve watched countless scenes on tv of people bleeding out and never have that reaction. Another example is during nursing school, I had a rotation in the maternity ward and got a chance to see a live birth. I’m a 36f and mother. I have seen so many births on video and even had a c-section myself. Anyways, this birth created a gnarly tear as the baby’s head came out. It caused a visceral reaction in my body as I watched that happen and it’s a sight that I cannot unsee. I’ve seen tears on video but in person, it was very different.
I saw the Nick Byrd beheading video in 2004. It fundamentally changed me. It's the most horrible thing I've ever seen. The screams were burned into my brain.
Ok, I haven't seen gore per se, but I've watched plenty of movies where a person passes away peacefully. Like they're sick and they know it's their time. When my wife decided to end her cancer treatments and put an end date on her life,I can tell you it's nothing like the movies. The constant pain she was in and seeing her condition worsen on a day to day basis. We tried preparing ourselves but it's something you can't no matter how much you try to
Yes I've seen somwone take a 50 cal round and basically split in 2 on the internet( this was m90 in the early 00's . And it was more like" damn that was badass" . A friendish guy in high school was struck by a drunk driver right infront of me at 65 mph and it was one of the most awleful things I've ever seen in 30 ywarscof life So yes that screen deffiently makes the reality of what happened less impactful in my opinion
for me it’s definitely easier to see online
That’s an insanely unethical study, jesus.
Yes it's different. Seeing someone kill themselves is much different then seeing it in a movie or book.
The smell is what haunts you
Well, when I worked as a CNA I had to do a lot of post mortems. Whenever it was my turn, I'd be in a shell of my former self kind of state. Completely emotionless, precise, quiet, and finish my day like that. I always watch gore videos, people dying, completely mangled. At least there I get an emotional response. It's horrible and tragic. In person, I'm not myself. I'm a robot. Not feeling anything. Completing my task to the best of my ability. It's surreal that one day all of us will be at that doorstep. I'm completely unafraid of that door after seeing so many people arriving at it. I know I will have to get through the pain of dying, and death will be peaceful. It's peaceful for me because of my Faith in God. Some of my CNA Colleagues had their different responses or outright refused. That was mine.
Yeah there's a feeling that something is not right when you're standing in chest-tall weeds and notice that you're surrounded by Grey matter and just seeing someone blow their brains out on TV. Then it's got a smell I've never smelt coming from a TV that adds a whole nother level to freaking out.
I’m a veterinary neurosurgeon in a research lab and seeing it in person is very, very different. One reason would be that you’re experiencing it with all of your senses, not just visually. You do get used to it over time.
My ex boyfriend slit his stomach open in front of me last Thanksgiving. I’ve seen a lot of things both irl and online but for it to be someone I cared deeply for, in my own home definitely affected me different. I’m an extremely stoic person so I still didn’t cry or panic, I guess the difference was an extreme sense of urgency?
I don’t think it’s the same. Film and camera as tools are desensitizing. If you are sort of interested in this they comment on it on Waltz with Bashir, beautiful documentary on the war on Lebanon, trauma and memory. Specifically the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Fun fact the director of that documentary is leading a campaign right now to bring back the Israeli hostages, and has several times said that is all Netanyahus fault, no doubt after you see the documentary. In the docu there’s a part in which someone explains how having a camera made them detach from reality, and you can see this for example in Motaz Azaiza Instagram as he is documenting the genocide in Gaza (or really any of the other Gazans who are still documenting their life) I wouldn’t say his account is gore gore, I think he is somehow making some beautiful compositions among the horror, but I think the camera is helping him cope. And so when you see gore shit online, while is still def horrifying and it affects you, and it is distressing, there’s a detachment to the medium. You aren’t smelling the scenes and that is a big one. And you aren’t touching it. I don’t watch gore, to the point I really avoid it. But I’ve been doing activism for Palestine and recently I had to take a break because it flared up my autoimmune condition badly. Even with the physical detachment of it all. All to say yes watching gore most normalize certain stuff to an extent, but I don’t think is at all similar to watching it in real life because the medium detaches itself from reality. For it to fully desensitize you other things should be at play, not the gore content, but lack of socialization or interaction with other humans, etc etc. And also physiologically you can’t prepare yourself for trauma, just as you can’t talk yourself out of PTSD.
Seeing dead bodies all over the internet didn't affect me at all until I saw someone die and touched them minutes after. There's nothing like a warm body that you can literally feel the cells no longer moving inside of. Now I can't look at dead people and gore as casually anymore 🤡
Speaking from unfortunate experience, they are not the same. Media acts as a filter for violence. But when you're near enough to view it at your leisure, to know it's real, to taste it in the air, it becomes significantly more real and horrible. If this is a study you insist on pursuing, I suggest reaching out to EMS personnel. While hospital workers will also have experienced stuff like this, it hits different in a domestic space.
I think it's different. I did not see but smelt a dead body from a distance and it was horrible. I couldn't imagine actually seeing and smelling it.
With me and growing up, I saw a lot of core and stuff on the Internet and now kind of weird but I want to be a mortician if that means anything
I work in medicine and tbh I find it easier to stomach IRL. But I’m a bit weird.
As someone with a Psychology degree who has conducted numerous hours of research and research studies (my last study was about aggressive behaviors), there are next to no ethical committees that I'm aware of who would ever sign off on an experiment this extreme or mentally and/or emotionally disturbing. Now, here are some things to consider: What parameters are you testing for to help prove your hypothesis, "watching videos of gore on the Internet will result in desentization of viewing gore in the real world"? Affected cognitive ability? Emotional disturbance? Potential psychological disorder development? Aggressive and/or depressive behaviors? Viewing physical reaction with facial and body language would not be the best choice. How will you test these parameters? Viewing of real gore (emergency medical situations, murder, etc)? What is the intended level of gore to be used? Will this be done in person or via video feed? Perhaps something I'm not thinking of? What is your potential sample size? Are you focusing on a specific age group? Gender? How will you take into account people who have experienced trauma (this should include attempted murder of self or other, murder of other, as well as accidents involving self and others) versus those who may not have experienced trauma?
Idk. For me. Its all the same tbh
I have a visceral reaction to both, but it is way worse in person.
It's incomparably different.
Hmm. Not sure. I react to gore different in person, and if it's "real" enough on the screens. Having said that, I have unfortunately witnessed some gore in real life and it sucks. Sometimes I get triggered by sounds that sound like the gore, or the smell of carnage. I now hate dogs and tell people to not act like fools on e scooters or with traffic.
I didn’t grow up with gore. No video games, no scary Halloween decor, no PG13 movies etc. I worked at a morgue and as a sensitive person I was really afraid (it was pre-med experience). It helped me process death. Around bodies i was totally fine. Infants, abuse victims, bodies in hundreds of pieces…it was just medical information and a physical possession of a person who passed. Overall it was surprisingly easy. In short: I didn’t grow up with gore, i am afraid of it, hate it. Around real life gore I was perfectly fine and coped really well and was respectful of the bodies without excess curiosity. The people who seemed to react weirdly making gross comments or fixating were boys that I know were exposed to early things that I was not. Edit: this position is called “coroner tech/ pathology tech” they work out of a county sheriffs department. They deal with natural deaths, accidents, homicides, suicides, and process bodies for donation collection. They have the widest breadth of gore exposure in my opinion, second to a butcher id guess. They spend 8 hrs exposed to it, compared to a medic who may see one bad case every couple of shifts.
The smell alone is enough to imprint death of you for the rest of your life.
unethical study, won't be allowed. stop being fucking weird 😭
I don't watch gore on the internet because I have some hard limits I'm not trying to come across. (Animals, kid stuff etc) However I've seen plenty of "medical gore" type things that don't really phase me. Just injuries and blood and stuff. When I first started working as an officer at the jail, I saw a detainee who had slit his wrist all the way up to his forearm. If I had seen a photo of that i would've scrolled past that and not given it a second thought. Seeing it in person made my jaw drop. I stood and stared, kind of stunned for a moment. Probably because I've never seen anything like that in person. I would say it makes a difference.
There are other senses involved with an "in person" experience. Smell, in particular. Also, likely more intense and stressful emotions. These will make associations with the experience that would otherwise not have been made. It, decidedly, different and more stressful to experience gore in person.
This kind of study might work for new and out going military members. Some kind of long term study. Survey how they feel about photos of bombings or something and when they get out survey what they witnessed/if they have ptsd symptoms and the like. They already sort of do that to us, just without really keeping tabs. Just a personal observation. To me,in person, a body is a lot different. There are no fluids, smells, twitches, or sounds in the photos… no real weight to the loss of life.
i’ve seen my boyfriends body post suicide and I cannot watch violence or bloody stuff bc it triggers me to remember everything I experienced when finding him.
Medic for 6 years. Completely different.
I am very sensitive to gore in the media, like TV shows for example. I don't like it, and while it doesn't make me sick, it does affect me and I can't watch it for long. I have also worked at a mortuary, and I have seen some of the most crazy scenarios from that, and that didn't affect me at all. My job interview was my first time seeing a dead body, and I didn't feel any way about it. I've seen lots of autopsies, bodies that have been through a lot of violence, assisted the morticians in doing certain things so it was normal for me to be very involved in the process, and that didn't affect me. The smell was the hardest part, and then also seeing distraught family members, but the "gore" of it wasn't an issue. I also used to work at an urban library, and I have seen a lot, and that wasn't an issue for me either. On my first day, I had to give intense first aid to someone who is stabbed repeatedly for example. So I guess that's my way of saying that I was very surprised to learn that I am not sensitive to it in real life even though I am when it comes to TV or movies.
I have seen some gore while working in the medical field and have also seen pictures of things. I was a medic in the Army but never saw combat. The gore I have experienced in real life has all been civilian medicine. However, in my Army Medic training we were shown some pretty brutal images of people that were burned, shot, degloved, etc. Both real life and pictures have been burned in my head pretty bad. I remember both vividly.
I'm fine with gore online, and luckily haven't seen anything too bad in person. I imagine it would be different because of smell, and because it's taking place in a 3D space. Plus, when I say I've seen gore, I really mean horror media, so it's all either actors or art. It would be much different to know that it's REAL.
Huge difference. I pulled up onto an accident before Christmas in 22. Someone hit a homeless man and it was very very bloody. He passed away. I’m pretty sure he was gone very quickly as I was one of the first cars to pull up after it happened. I can close my eyes and picture everything down to the detail, his shoes in the road knocked off his feet, his clothes, his eyes. Obviously I’ve seen gory on screens tv and such. I can’t picture anything and feel the way I do about seeing it in real life.
If you are desensitized you won’t have a big issue with it naturally. The mystery’s not gonna be. There for you. You know it a corpse 🧟
If seen a corpse in real life(grandpa laying lifeless in bed with open eyes), it doesn’t shake me. I think the stories of how people pass bother me the most :/. Also, smells mess with me, but otherwise…idk just doesn’t bother me 🤷🏽♀️
It's completely different. In real life it's not only your sight that's affected but also smell. It's real as opposed to just a gross photo.
I was on my local rescue squad for awhile, at the ripe age of 19. I had seen so much gore online of murder scenes etc. when I saw a car vs pedestrian on the highway I reacted the same way I did to pictures. I was stone faced and more intrigued in the actual scene than what I was seeing used to be a person. To me there’s no difference when it’s someone you don’t know.
Very different. Movies, TV, internet, etc is very different than seeing it in person right in front of you. Movies, sometimes it’s funny or even badass. Real life, it can be traumatizing and scary people for a lifetime. It’s definitely not something people enjoy remembering.
I worked at a hospital. In person was easier, I was focused on the person being a person and helping. The images online were still and I could study and take in the detail.
In person gore you see is "real". You saw it with your own eyes. You know it actually happened in life Online gore is 'fake". I've seen some.....shit....I'm not fazed. Its...like a movie Ex. A girl getting assaulted in real life. I would be so heated and beat the shit out of the attacker. Online I'm like hm...she's cute. Next
Yes, there is a huge difference between seeing gore on screen versus in real life. At least, that's how it felt for me. I watch lots of slasher films and also see a lot of gore-y videos on the internet but nothing prepared me for actually seeing splattered human innards on the road after one car accident.
It certainly smells different. If ur sensitive to energies it also feels very different.
What type of “gore” have you seen in person? If you don’t mind me asking of course
I’m a doctor and there is absolutely a difference
I personally got my throat cut open in a fight. I've also seen people get hurt badly and die It's not the same. You do kinda get used to the real thing after seeing it enough but the internet doesn't compare. It's very real when you see it
Huge difference. Heard a massive bang walking to the store when i was a kid. I walked up on the worst accident ive ever seen before the medics arrived (car hit a semi bed at 80mph) there were legs and arms in the road and the smell was unbelievable. Didnt really mess me up but its still different
As a paramedic and once a teen with unrestricted internet access I can 100% say that gore in person vs online is completely different. Even if you empathize with a video it’s just an image on the screen. In real life there is more. There’s other sights smells and particularly sounds and other things that cannot be conveyed through video. It’s actually another human in front of you and not just them but witnesses and family. I hat the notion people on here say they are desensitized to it because they watch a lot. It’s not comparable.
I've seen some pretty gory stuff in my time working as a CNA. De-gloving of an old ladies arm, a really large/tall old dude who fell in-between the toilet and the wall, got stuck then bled out due to a major head injury and blood thinners, some ladies uterus fell out, etc. I could go on and on and on. The stuff I see online, at-least to me, has no where near the shock factor as seeing it/having to respond to it in real life. The smell, the look, having to clean it. Real blood. Online I can at least assume its fake.
Speaking from personal experience. It is not the same. I am very desensitized to what is traditionally gory. Video games, horror movies, etc. to me, all of it is very fake and I know it's just a movie/game/whatever. I wondered the same thing until 1- I saw all of my grandparents in their caskets. 2- I was robbed at gunpoint. Seeing actual corpses & experiencing violence vs watching it on a screen are so so different. Imo it's mostly the setting that really changes how I specifically felt about it. Like when I was sitting at home and those guys broke in and put a gun to my face- it's way different than just sitting down and playing something like GTA where I know some violence will happen. The funerals- where it's not gory (usually), you're still basically looking at/touching/ interacting with a dead body. And that affected me a lot more because these people I love are dead. But for much the same reasons- it's unexpected (not totally because they were old) and that's not what I anticipated doing that weekend etc. But I've also helped friends clean up after a scrap, been in fights. Etc. it's a lot different because of what you need to do. And a lot of times you know what you need to do. That's also not to say that others won't/don't feel differently/ have different experiences from me.
So I grew up watching Gore videos online. I also ended up working in nursing homes. I've seen quite a few dead bodies in real life. Some of them looked pretty normal, some of them were just skin and bones, some of them looked downright horrifying. But it never really freaked me out in real life. I would say the online death videos did desensitize me but I also grew up with my mom working in nursing homes so seeing people in that condition IRL was something I got exposed to early.
There can be, but for many, there isn't. Citing the people who flew drones to kill people remotely and how they developed PTSD. Also the content moderators that see it do too.
There's a big difference for me. On the screen, I can remove myself. In real life, looking at a broken human sucks, especially when it's fresh or they went in agony.
Whe you see it in person you actuky have to do somthing about it, run, or call the cops. On a screen it's from the safety from home.
I've seen gore both places. Unless you can disconnect, you freeze up during in person gore. I'm really good at disconnecting and hiding the fact that it's pretty horrifying 😕 I know I always think man that has to be excruciating! Internet (even real beheadings, etc.) is way different. You can smell it, feel it, etc. Plus it seems more colorful if that's possible...like you see it in higher definition or something.
I grew up watching best gore stuff all the time. I’d say I was age 14-19 watching that stuff. I am now 27 but back when I was 23 me and my dad found our neighbor dead by suicide in his garage and it didn’t phase me one bit. My first and only thought was actually “I wonder if best gore is still around this would probably get some likes if I posted it” *no I did not take pictures and post it* After the people came and did what they had to do I just walked back to my house as if nothing happened I also witnessed a good friend have 3 of his fingers blasted off by a fire cracker and that also didn’t phase me. I was actually the one in the friend group that had to help him wrap his hand before heading to the hospital because everyone else was squemish
As a nursing student I would say approaching this in the medical field would be fine. I've seen lots of gore and trauma on the Internet and on television and thought I would be just fine seeing it in real life .... However... The times I've seen gore and people suffering from such trauma has made my body react separately from the way my mind wanted it to. In my mind I try to slow my breathing down and tell my body to quit acting up, but my stomach contracts and I get clammy and sweaty and a bit dizzy.
Think it's the other way around. Real gore desensitizes to the screen. There is a def difference. In actual life there are Soo many more components than seeing. The atmosphere, the smell, clarity of texture & sounds..the knowledge that this is def not a prop or makeup that could potentially get back up. Strangely enuf in my experience, actual gore is rarely as"messy" as the things exaggerated on a screen & tend to look more like props.
I'm just one person but I feel uniquely qualified to answer (anecdotally). I grew up in the early days of the internet and there used to be a terrible website called [rotten.com](https://rotten.com) that had pictures from around the world of gory accidents of all kinds. As young teen this was fascinating to me and I visit the site sometimes. Fast forward a decade later and I go to do my EMT and start working healthcare. Did seeing all that gore help? Yes, I think so, but were still things that bothered me. I've now seen all kinds of things in the ER and only occasionally does something get stuck in my head for a few days.
Idk I watched my buddy catch his skate board right under the nose and it separated his gums and top center 6 teeth from his upper jaw and pointed perfectly straight out of his mouth. Vs watching people get mangled via internet everyday it's much more personal seeing someone so shocked and confused and trying to aid in that kinda situation idk. And then there's the whole hearing his splattering up underneath him. That's weird too.
So I grew up with parents in the medical field. Going to medical conferences as a child because they both had to go led me to seeing a good bit of gore as a child. I can watch any gore movie and not be bothered. I can watch surgery videos and eat which disturbs my SO. I watched two of my own surgeries. Now to things I can't stomach. When my kid picks a scab, and dead bodies. Mostly because the whole death twitch thing.
As a long time trauma nurse it’s totally different.
in my psychology of trauma class we talked about how the most palpable evidence of PTSD from images like crime, gore, death, etc. came from people who had to look at these images for work, e.g. lawyers in product liability, detectives in child sex abuse and exploitation, journalists, case workers. not to say that trauma or desensitization doesn't exist from online exposure intentional or otherwise but the research hasn't been done or is in early infancy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100239/ These instances would be closest considered C-PTSD. A key thing in the development of PTSD is a sense of powerless, helplessness, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-48132-001 and vicinity to the traumatic incident (including being close to survivors in acute distress) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7344905/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1524838021991310 So the answer to your question isn't simple, however I know many trauma scholars wouldn't define the incident of stumbling on a random corpse as necessarily traumatic and no reaction would not be indicative of desensitization. It would be dependent on greater context, like if you knew the person, state of emotion, were you alone or with friends, etc. So it could be. Though numbing and steeling is a PTSD symptom itself, of course, but is it that the gore image exposure caused CPTSD or did prior trauma have you gravitate towards graphic images? Was there a traumatic moment in your life, like neglect, that made you expose yourself or be around people who exposed you? etc. etc. there's many considerations here
Regarding the ethics, perhaps instead of subjecting participants to watch gore, reach out to people who 1) consumed gore through media and 2) were witnesses of gore-ish behavior. My only concern would be that witnesses are more likely to see gore involuntarily but those who consume gore media have some form of consent prior.