Media and emotion

Lightly covered terrain

What is emotion?

• Widely disputed, so we need to simply choose a position– emotion is a complex of beliefs, arousal and

valence of affect

Features of emotion• Emotions are typically conscious phenomena• They typically involve pervasive bodily

manifestations• They vary in intensity, type and range of intentional

objects, valence• They can undermine rationality• They contribute to defining our ends and priorities;• They have a central place in moral education and the

moral life.– Wikipedia

– You don’t always have control over your emotions– Emotions drive action– Emotions organize cognitive and behavioral

processes• Motivational

What determines which emotion we are feeling?

• Miron: The dedicated neural pathway that is being stimulated.– Different pathways are excited depending upon the

emotion.

However: In some cases the paths are quite similar and therefore the individual must identify the emotion based on an evaluation of the cause and situation (anger v. fear)

The experience of emotion

• Psychophysiological effects are often “autonomic” in that they do not require thinking– May override more logical, evaluative brain functions

when the emotional intensity is high– Feelings are learned along with situations, people, etc.– Similar people or situations may bring about the same

feelings and the same feelings may bring about memories of the situations or people they were encoded with

Physical responses to emotion

• The body frequently responds to Shame by warmth in the upper chest and face, Fear by a heightened heartbeat, increased "flinch" response, and increased muscle tension. The sensations connected with anger are nearly indistinguishable from fear. Happiness is often felt as an expansive or swelling feeling in the chest and the sensation of lightness or boyancy, as if standing underwater. Sadness by a feeling of tightness in the throat and eyes, and relaxation in the arms and legs. Desire can be accompanied by a dry throat and heavy breathing.

Innate emotions

• Basic emotions are hard-wired into our brains.

• “Fight or flight” reactions–Fear–Anger

• “Lizard brain” emotions

Evidence for the innateness of (some) emotions

1) Similar forms demonstrated among species;

2) Similar form from childhood to adulthood; expressed before learning can take place;

3) Similar across cultures; 4) Similar in blind and sighted people.

– http://emotion.bme.duke.edu/Emotion/EmoRes/Psych/CogExp/Behav.html

Social emotions

• Emotions that allow you to interact with others effectively and to maintain social bonds– Love– Friendship– Empathy

• Learned early through the positive relationships between mom and food, etc.

• Located in old mammalian brain

Relations to others

• Much of emotion is based on our relationships with others– Interactions with others– Observation of others– Thoughts about others

• A range of relations between audience members and media personas has been proposed, with varying emotional implications

Major emotions

• Sadness/sorrow– Sources:

• Loss of significant other/love/affiliation• Empathy for those in pain/poor circumstance

• Anger– Frustration– Control by outside force

• Fear– Threat

• Darkness, snakes and spiders• Socially-learned fears

Robert Plutchik’s model of primary and derived emtions

Why haven’t emotions been replaced with higher order thinking?

• Miron: Survival value maintained anger, sorrow, love, fear, etc. until the development of civilization. There are still advantages for several of the emotions in that they provide coherence of thought, feeling and action in regards to general situations—anger for frustration, love for sexuality and nurturance, fear for self-preservation in the face of a threat.

What are emotions for?

• Emotions are essential to decision-making

• Emotions can still be helpful in driving behavior effectively and efficiently

Influence of culture

• Culture provides a wide range of objects and rewards that can tie emotion to behaviors, beliefs, experiences, etc.

• Cultures differ in their evaluation of varied beliefs and behaviors, and individual emotions are influenced by those differences

Emotion and entertainment

• Entertainment usually is tied to being ‘moved’ by a media experience– Arousal

• Though it is clear that entertainment and emotion are closely tied, the nature of the relationship is not well understood

Why are we drawn to emotional content?

• Miron: Arousal (a component of emotions) is inherently pleasurable– The main driving force for human action is to seek

pleasure and avoid pain– Arousal stimulates the release of dopamine, a sort

of natural ‘drug’ within the brain

Why are we drawn to emotional content?

• Emotions are encoded along with cognitions, perceptions, behaviors and outcomes. When we encounter similar cognitions, etc., the linked emotions are called up—especially when a lack of some important condition is identified (food, warmth, sex)

Why are we drawn to emotional content?

• Zillmann: We enjoy watching the good guys rewarded and the bad guys punished. The enjoyment is enhanced by the wrong thing happening prior to an appropriate conclusion

Physical elements that affect arousal

• Movement/camera movement• Volume/speed of sound• Cut speed• Camera angle/distance

Content elements that affect emotion

• Threats– Spiders– Snakes– Spoiled food

• Music– Major/minor– Learned associations

• Characters– Identification/liking– Emotion presentation

• Plot– Justice

• Objects of emotional attachment– Flags, Statue of Liberty

Explaining the effects of imagination

• Philosophers forward two basic accounts to explain the effects that the imagination has upon us.

• Simulation theory employs a computer analogy, saying that imagining something involves one having one's usual emotional response to situations and people, only the emotions are running off-line. – Our emotions are aroused, but we do not feel a

need to take action

• This could explain why we enjoy watching things on the screen that we would hate seeing in real life. – Horror shows– Tear jerkers

• Simulation theorists say that when we experience an emotion off-line that would be distressing in real life, we may actually enjoy having that emotion in the safety of the off-line situation.

Problems

• Why would experiencing distressing emotions offline end up being pleasurable?– They do not provide a convincing explanation

• [Can we draw upon some of the cognitive work, sociobiology for this?]

• What does it mean for emotions to be running “off-line?”

Thought theory

• An alternative account of our emotional response to imagined scenarios has been dubbed the thought theory. This view says that we can have emotional responses to mere thoughts. – Anger can be brought about by hearing of an

injustice

• Thus, our emotions are brought about by the thoughts that occur to us as we are watching a film. When we see the dastardly villain tying the innocent heroine to the tracks, we are both concerned and outraged by the very thought that he is acting in this way and that she is therefore in danger. – We are aware that we are witnessing merely fictional

situations, so there is no temptation to take physical action. – As a result, there is no need, says the thought theorist, for

the complexities of simulation theory in order to explain why we are moved by the movies.

But . . .

• Why should a mere thought draw an emotional response from us? – We are quite capable of being aware of horrific

things happening to people yet be unmoved by that knowledge.

– Since we can't have full-fledged beliefs about the fictional characters in films, the thought theory needs to explain why we are so moved by their fates.

Emotional engagement• “Philosophic discussion of viewer

involvement with films starts out with a puzzle that has been raised about many art forms: Why should we care what happens to fictional characters? After all, since they are fictional, their fates shouldn't matter to us in the way that the fates of real people do. But, of course, we do get involved in the destinies of these imaginary being. The question is why.” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Emotional engagement

• “One answer, common in the film theory tradition, is that the reason that we care about what happens to some fictional characters is because we identify with them. Although or, perhaps, because these characters are highly idealized — they are more beautiful, brave, resourceful, etc. than any actual human being could be — viewers identify with them, thereby also taking themselves to be correlates of these ideal beings. But once we see the characters as versions of ourselves, their fates matter to us, for we see ourselves as wrapped up in their stories.”– Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy

However:

• We exhibit a wide variety of attitudes toward the fictional characters we see projected on the screen.

• We have emotional reactions to characters with whom we did not identify.

• “The general outline of the answer philosophers of film have provided to the question of our emotional involvement with films is that we care about what happens in films because films get us to imagine things taking place, things that we do care about. Because how we imagine things working out does affect our emotions, fiction films have an emotional impact upon us.”– Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Media influences over emotion

• Sound/music– Major/minor key– Melody/dissonance– Volume– Dynamics– Speed– Timbre– Sharpness– Orchestration/richness

Music and emotion

• Leonard Bernstein borrowed from Chomsky’s ideas and applied them to music, claiming that there is an innate code buried in the musical structure which we are biologically endowed to understand.

• He tried to show how the underlying strings, the basic meanings behind music, are transformed by composers into the surface structure of a composition.

• Bernstein thought that the main difference between language and music is that music amplifies the emotions more effectively, thereby making it more universal.

Expression rules research

• Many have assumed that the greatest part of the emotional power of music comes in the variations of tempo, dynamics, and articulation. Several researchers have also assumed that these variations conform to structural principles and have attempted to demonstrate these expression rules.

• Paul Hindemith wrote that tempi that match the heart rate at rest (roughly 60-70 beats per minute) suggest a state of repose. Tempi that exceed this heart rate create a feeling of excitation. He wrote that mood shifts in music are faster and more contrasting than they are in real life.

Happy and sad classical music

• Children and adults were asked to rate classical music that was manipulated in tempo and minor v. major key as sad or happy

Video influences over emotion

• Pacing• Camerawork

– Movement– Distance– Focus– Color

Babies one year old react to emotions on TV

• Experiment with toys and televised examples of positive and negative emotions being demonstrated in facial expressions– 1-year olds react to negative but not positive

expressions– No difference for 10-month olds