Like all arts, movies are an art form that is extremely vibrant and imbued with the ideas of the human mind. They are, after all, the creation of man, who used all the amazing moving images and lifelike sounds, so that filmmakers could meet the audience through celluloid and the senses. Since their beginnings in the late 19th century, movies have remained a central source of entertainment, with the global cinema and home entertainment market exceeding the $100 billion mark in 2019. Today, the two most commercially successful streaming platforms, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, have more than 400 million members worldwide.
This great interest in watching movies and the deep emotional responses to them has prompted many researchers in several fields to ask what motivates people to watch movies. In 2012, Dr. Skip Dine Young, a professor of psychology at Hanover College in Indiana who is interested in popular culture and narrative psychology, published a book entitled “Cinema and Psychology: An Endless Relationship,” in which he proposed the duality of cinema and the human mind, and presented how psychologists have explained the effect of film types on human emotions. In his pioneering work “Film: A Psychological Study” in 1916, Meinster Brigg stated that the main goal of filmmaking is to portray emotions.
Researchers today still agree with Minster, highlighting the emotional experience as the key to keeping audiences engaged and entertained by movies. The emotional responses elicited by movies have been shown to be similar to those elicited by real-life events at physiological levels, such as heart rate and electrodermal activity, expressive levels, such as facial expressions, neurological levels, such as fear and anxiety, and behavioral levels, such as startle reactions.
A new study led by the Martin Luther Institute at the University of Halle-Wittenberg has revealed how people’s favorite movie genres are linked to the neural processing of fear and anger in their brains. The researchers compared movie preference data with brain activity records from 257 people using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
What did the fMRI scan reveal during the experiment?
Several studies have addressed the question of why media-induced negative emotions are entertaining and enjoyed by wide audiences. Despite some early experimental attempts to decipher this question, little is known about individual differences in preference for media types that differ in emotional profiles. This study is the first to investigate associations of brain activity with film genre preference with particular regard to preference-related differences in processing fearful and angry emotional stimuli.
The researchers investigated emotional reactions in detail by analyzing data from 257 people who shared information about their movie preferences. The participants’ brain activity was analyzed via functional magnetic resonance imaging using naturalistic movie-watching designs, in which subjects were shown fearful or angry faces and geometric shapes while they lay in an MRI machine.
The researchers focused on two brain regions: the amygdala, which is responsible for processing vital emotions. “The amygdala can trigger a fight-or-flight response in response to threats,” said psychologist Esther Zwicky of Martin Luther University. The second was the nucleus accumbens, known as the brain’s reward center. The results were surprising. “We found that action movie fans showed the strongest responses in both regions,” Zwicky said. “We didn’t expect that, as action movies typically offer a lot of stimuli.”
So it made more sense that action fans would be less motivated. However, the results suggest that action movie fans are particularly susceptible to emotional stimuli and find this stimulation engaging. The research team found similar brain activity in people who prefer comedies. A different picture emerged for fans of crime, thriller, and documentaries, with both brain regions responding much less to emotional stimuli than the other groups of participants. “It seems that people choose the types of movies that stimulate their brains best,” Zwicky said.
Possible explanations for the results
To assess movie preferences and media consumption, participants were asked to choose their preference from among 8 movie genres (action, crime/thriller, horror, drama, romance, comedy, documentary, sci-fi/fantasy).
Participants were offered to choose two equally preferred genres, to obtain a realistic picture of individuals’ movie preferences and to prevent potential loss of information due to forced selection. 84.8% chose this option. Participants were then divided into two groups if two preferences were reported. The horror genre was excluded from all analyses due to the small sample size (n=6), leaving 7 genres (action, crime, drama, romance, comedy, documentary, science fiction/fantasy) for the fMRI analyses.
In order to find possible explanations for the differences in the directions of influence of preference for action films on the one hand and preference for crime/thriller films and documentaries on the other hand, the definitions of cinematic genres must be revised, and action and documentary should be placed at opposite poles in different dimensions such as fiction versus non-fiction, and emotional versus non-emotional, as the boundaries between action and crime/thriller seem less clear.
According to the study paper, both action and crime genres share a common emotional range that is primarily characterized by the arousal of negative and primitive emotions, such as fear and anger, through the depiction of dangerous, life-threatening and violent scenes.
Furthermore, the transfer of excitement is used as a stylistic device to build up excitement throughout the plot to create exaggerated excitement at the climax in films of both genres, and thus given the great overlap in quality and emotionality, the differences in responses in the limbic system (the part of the brain responsible for behavioral and emotional responses) seem unexpected, although similar emotional sensations are targeted in both action and crime/thriller genres.
However, the basic function may differ, and researchers have differed in interpreting genre preferences. Some believe that they are not an expression of a preference for the basic emotions induced by the relevant films, but rather a result of the satisfaction derived from these basic cinematic emotions. Each type of film has the ability to include various emotional satisfactions, and the susceptibility to these satisfactions varies between individuals. For example, in his study “Why We Keep Coming Back” conducted by Tom Robinson in 2014, in which he and a group of researchers analyzed people’s attraction to horror films by using the “Q Methodology,” a method used to study subjective views that focuses on how people see things personally by sorting data according to their opinions in an organized manner. This method helps researchers identify different perceptions between groups.
They identified three different types of horror fans, based on whether they derive satisfaction primarily from the emotional experience, or from deciphering the mysterious plot, showing that for some genres, the potential for emotional satisfaction lies primarily in the experience of the emotions and the accompanying arousal itself, while in other genres the emotions are more functional, such as challenging the viewer’s adaptive abilities or enhancing immersion in the story.
If the idea that film genres are preferred by individuals who are more susceptible to the gratification associated with a particular genre is followed, it seems plausible that individuals who are more neurologically predisposed to respond and approach fear and anger are those who prefer films that rely primarily on the emotional arousal resulting from the representation and evocation of these emotions.
Conversely, it also seems logical that those with low responsiveness and lower tendencies towards emotional stimuli, such as fearful and angry faces, would seek out films that engage viewers on a more cognitive level than an emotional one, such as factual information in documentaries.
Differences between individuals in brain response to negative emotional stimuli could also be a result of watching movies of a certain type repeatedly. All of these possibilities require a lot of future research, especially since this research did not analyze brain activity data during watching horror movies, which are characterized by a frightening paradox: fear arises when people are exposed to threats of physical or social harm.
People usually do their best to avoid frightening situations, which raises questions about the scientific reason behind many people’s desire to watch horror movies.
However, the results of this study remain an important step towards understanding the key components of producing the optimal type and degree of stimulation, and future research should investigate the impact of exposure to media content that is consistent or inconsistent with individual neural response tendencies on overall psychological well-being.