Even though it's pretty universal, psychologists haven't been studying the feeling of being "creeped out" all that much.
One noteworthy paper, titled 'On the nature of creepiness,' came in 2013 from Frank McAndrew, professor of psychology at Knox College in Illinois, and his then graduate student Sara Koehnke.
Their research was based on the results of their survey, which asked more than 1,300 people, "What is creepy?" And as it turns out, "creepy" isn’t actually all that complicated.
"[Creepy is] about the uncertainty of threat. You're feeling uneasy because you think there might be something to worry about here, but the signals are not clear enough to warrant your doing some sort of desperate, life-saving kind of thing," McAndrew explained to Smithsonian Magazine.
According to him, being creeped out is different from fear or revulsion. In both of those emotional states, you usually have no confusion about how to respond. But when you're creeped out, your brain and your body are telling you that something is not quite right, and you'd better pay attention because it might hurt you.
This sometimes manifests as a physical sensation, too. In 2012, researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands discovered that when people were creeped out, they felt colder and believed the room temperature had actually dropped. In other words, they got the chills!
That physical response further heightens your senses, and "You don't know how to act, but you're really concerned about getting more information," McAndrew adds. "It kind of takes your attention and focuses it like a laser on this particular stimulus, whatever it is."
As you can see from this list, we can be creeped out by all sorts of things, situations, places, and, of course, people. Most research has looked at what makes people seem creepy. For example, the 2012 study successfully creeped people out by exposing them to others who behaved in an abnormal non-verbal way.
In the experiment, subjects interacted with researchers who practiced degrees of subtle mimicry: when the subject scratched her head, the researcher would do something similar, such as touch his nose. Subjects felt creeped out – and colder – when the researcher didn't mimic, indicating a discomfort with people who may not be able to follow social norms and cues.
McAndrew and Koehnke's survey also explored what made people appear creepy, first asking participants to rate the likelihood that a person described as creepy would exhibit a set of characteristics or behaviors, such as greasy hair, extreme pallor or thinness, or an unwillingness to let a conversation drop. In another section, it asked people to indicate how much they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about "the nature of creepy people."
Perhaps the biggest sign of whether someone was considered creepy was unpredictability. "So much of [what is creepy] is about wanting to be able to predict what's going to happen, and that's why creepy people creep us out — because they're unpredictable," McAndrews said, noting that the 2012 study also seemed to highlight that point. "We find it hard to know what they're going to do next."
