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Psychology in movies concept paper
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The act of crying at a film is a common concept to all people as in any film, there are elements of tragedy. These are normally presented through a multi-sensory experience for the audience and directors always want an empathetic response to a film, creating memories of a certain emotion. The idea of crying at a movie or film or any other emotional response comes from two pre-conceived ideas which relate to the nature of our brains, according to Jeffrey Zacks, a professor of psychology and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis who has recently written a book called “Flicker: Your Brain on Movies”, exploring the two fundamental reasons why humans produce such a powerful response to certain films and I will be …show more content…
This idea is from emotion memory which is discussed in Zacks’ book, “Flicker: Your Brain on Movies” and says that when we experience emotion, it has already been defined and remembered by the brain and the memories of several characteristics, both facial and physical that allow people to recognise emotion. An example of this is when we cry, the tear ducts are sent a message by the brain to be stimulated as it becomes part of muscle memory. Physically, having a hunched posture and often not showing our face overlap with the emotion of embarrassment and allow people to recognise these characteristics however, these actions are derived from the past and what the brain can remember to do to display someone’s emotion at a specific time. The memories will have been founded from infancy, the time in a person’s life when the most learning occurs and where emotions are remembered, often shaping our personalities in adult life according to stimuli and surroundings in
There are two types of movies that provide psychic relief. One of those types of movies could be a horror film that makes everyone scream. The other type is a movie like Marley and Me that provides catharsis by making everyone cry. In Stephen King’s essay ¨Why We Crave Horror¨, he explains that the reason why we watch horror movies is because ¨… horror movies provide psychic relief¨. This is because he believes it is rare for people to have that opportunity to express such negative emotions when watching horror films. King’s argument has elements that agreeable and disagreeable. On the one hand, he is right when claiming that our emotions and fears need to be controlled by an exercise; however, his belief that horror movies provide psychic
Lehman, Peter and Luhr, William. Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
For example, the short story “ Why we crave horror “ Stephen says that we are having a “ particular sort of fun” meaning death. King says “ pro football has become the voyeur's version of combat,then the horror film has become the modern version”( Kings , “ why we crave horror” .2). Meaning the soldier’s version of combat has become the horror , in which kids see, fun to watch at a young age. Horror movies are to make a purpose for you to feel catharsis towards it. Emotion muscles also known as the human condition, are the way you feel about the horror in that case, having fun while watching it and finding it interesting. Compared to the narrator and the events of “Strawberry Spring,” we “reestablish our feelings of essential normality” (King, “Why We Crave” 1). Despite the macabre fact that multiple women are killed in the short story “Strawberry Spring,” the experience is a “peculiar sort of fun” (King, “Why We Crave”
The first section explores the “flat-brain theory of emotions, flat-brain syndrome, and flat-brain tango” (Petersen, 2007, pp. 2-45). All three are interrelated (Petersen, 2007). The flat-brain theory of emotions “demonstrates what’s occurring inside of us when things are going well, and how that changes when they are not” (Petersen, 2007, p. 11). Petersen’s (2007) theory “explains how our emotions, thinking, and relating abilities work and how what goes on inside us comes out in the ways we communicate and act” (p. 8). The “flat-brain syndrome” describes what happens when an individual wears their emotions on their sleeve. This “makes it
With reference to the films you have studied for this topic, explore in detail two of the key elements that produce an emotional response in the spectator.
...d areas, including sympathy/empathy unresponsiveness and its negative outcomes, are the topics for future researches that can help us develop our understanding of emotional responses to fiction and emotional education. The fact that most of the concepts related to the issue raised in the text can refer to numerous types of processes implies on needing and developing other theories and researches. Therefore, in my opinion, in his essay “Empathy and (Film) Fiction” Alex Neill well-studied the concept of identification, empathy and emotional response to the film and, moreover, visualized the new “fresh” understanding of the significant value of the empathetic responses.
Audience's Emotional Response in The Triumph Of The Will, Cabaret, Schindler’s List and The Lion King
middle of paper ... ... In final analysis, the motion picture is the one that goes deeper inside the spectator’s mind. Other mediums such as still picture and theatrical play also provide the visual and aural elements for the spectator, yet they seem to be inferior to the motion picture in that they lack the reality, affinity, and creativity in terms of use of time and space. The levels of emotions such as attention, memory, imagination, emotion, and unity, which were introduced by Munsterberg, indicates how the spectator perceives the elements of the film and ends up with it.
When emotional memory is incorporated into the rehearsal process, the actor really starts to feel the same way that the character would in the given situation. An example of this from Stanislavski’s book ‘An Actor Prepares’ is when an actor is guided through an emotional memory exercise by the director. “Imagine our amazement when both Tortsov and Rokhmanov told us that, whereas our playing of this exercise used to be indirect, insincere, fresh and true; today it was false, insincere and affective. We were dismayed at such unexpected criticism. We insisted that we really felt what we were doing. “Of course you were feeling something”, said the director. “If you were not you would be dead. The point is: what were you seeing? Let us try to disentangle things and to compare your former with your present exercise.” (Stanislavski, 1936: 163-...
Emotional contagion is having one person's emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in another person or group of people. This can be done through a two-step process of emotional mimicry and synchronization of one's expressions and by vocalizations and posture feedback and movements. When people unconsciously mirror a partner’s expressions, they come to feel these reflections of emotions as well. Emotional mimicry is one of the most highly adaptive behaviors. One can have muscle movements that mirror the expressions they see, including looking at an angry face that activates the corrugator muscle which activates frowning. Then there is also a happy face that contracts the zygomatic major which helps with
Emotion is the “feeling” aspect of consciousness that includes physical, behavioral, and subjective (cognitive) elements. Emotion also contains three elements which are physical arousal, a certain behavior that can reveal outer feelings and inner feelings. One key part in the brain, the amygdala which is located within the limbic system on each side of the brain, plays a key role in emotional processing which causes emotions such as fear and pleasure to be involved with the human facial expressions.The common-sense theory of emotion states that an emotion is experienced first, leading to a physical reaction and then to a behavioral reaction.The James-Lange theory states that a stimulus creates a physiological response that then leads to the labeling of the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory states that the physiological reaction and the emotion both use the thalamus to send sensory information to both the cortex of the brain and the organs of the sympathetic nervous system. The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial expressions provide feedback to the brain about the emotion being expressed on the face, increasing all the emotions. In Schachter and Singer’s cognitive arousal theory, also known as the two-factor theory, states both the physiological arousal and the actual arousal must occur before the emotion itself is experienced, based on cues from the environment. Lastly, in the cognitive-mediational theory
Touch is one of our five main senses and important sense to be able to perceive reality. The way we as individuals touch things gives us a sense of connection whether it the thing we are touching is a hand of a friend or the prickly spines of a cactus. In the video Touch. it explores the different natures of touch in different movie clips the video provides. This video would attract viewers who are interested in the emotional atmosphere in films or for those who want to understand a deeper meaning of the term touch. Touch. communicates to the audience how touch can be perceived as a positive emotion, negative emotion or neutral emotion through the reactions of the actors and actresses in the movies. Note that this analysis will cover most clips
Across the globe watching movies started as an asylum for the working class, but slowly the ideas being portrayed onscreen have evolved resulting in movie going to become almost religious. Movies have the ability to leave us in awe as a result of their ability to give us a glimpse of a dream, however unrealistic. I myself am a huge fan of the film industry. I started to feel a certain reverence for it because of the way it inspired me to dream and gave birth to my ambitions. This ultimately led to me to go into an in depth investigation of whether I was the only one who felt this way and what affects had been created because of this feeling.
One scientist, Damasio, provided an explanation how emotions can be felt in humans biologically. Damasio suggested, “Various brain structures map both the organism and external objects to create what he calls a second order representation. This mapping of the organism and the object most likely occurs in the thalamus and cingulate cortices. A sense of self in the act of knowing is created, and the individual knows “to whom this is happening.” The “seer” and the “seen,” the “thought” and the “thinker” are one in the same.” By mapping the brain scientists can have a better understandi...
A significant amount of research exists testing the efficacy of certain clips in inducing certain emotions. Hewig et al. (2005) have found a set of clips that can effectively induce feelings of anger, disgust, fear, sadness and amusement. This was done by having 38 participants view 16 different clips thought to induce different emotions and then having them take a 21 emotion range inventory scale. The results indicated that a handful of these clips did in fact induce anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and amusement. (Hewig et al. 2005) In the proposed experiment one of each of the clips that induce these different emotions will be used in addition to a romantic