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Jeffrey Zacks: In my day job at my lab we study how people understand and remember everyday activity, and we have serious purposes for doing that. We're interested in diagnosing and assisting people with brain diseases and brain injuries, and improving educational interfaces.
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That's an important one for me, because in real life I'm a pretty mellow, stoic person, but I can catch myself crying at movies that are just dumb movies—and it doesn't even have to be a good one. I'm not alone; I meet people all the time who tell me exactly the same thing unprompted. So one part of the mechanism behind that is this "mirroring" or mimetic component, and it's really powerful. If you see somebody doing something, you are prone to performing a matching action.Now, there's another process that's happening at the same time, and sometimes they point in the same direction, sometimes in different directions, and that's that you're also prone to doing an action that had been successful in the past in such a situation.
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It's totally real, but what you just said is totally right. William James wrote 115 years ago that we think that we sweat because we're afraid and that we cry because we're sad, but it's just as true that we're afraid because we sweat and that we're sad because we cry.We think that the kind of primary thing in an emotion is the subjective label that we give it. But emotions are these integrated programs: They involve brain systems and peripheral systems, and behavior, and subjective experience. And it's all one thing.What kind of experiments and studies have you looked at that might back up this idea in relation to film?
One experiment done by colleagues elsewhere basically sought to evoke emotion programs by getting people to adopt the physical poses associated with those emotions without realizing that they're adopting an emotion-related pose.
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The main principle is that they can take the range of stimulation that we experience in natural life and just exaggerate it. It's intuitive that if I'm seeing someone else emoting, smiling, or crying, that can have a bigger effect on me if it's one person who's physically closer to me than if it's a face in a crowd of a thousand.Just think about it: normally when we're interacting with people and someone starts crying, if it gets too intense then we'll both tend to look away. But in a film you can have someone break down and just keep a close-up on their face, and have them 20ft tall, staring at you, crying. And filmmakers will do that. Of course that's going to tug at our heartstrings. What they're doing is exaggerating that facial aspect way outside the range that we'd experience in real life.At the same time, they're able to use editing and sound and music in a way that's congruent with what we're seeing in the facial aspect. You can't underestimate the power of music to produce these emotional effects.Follow Huw on Twitter.