Media and emotion

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Media and emotion

• Lightly covered terrain

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What is emotion?

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

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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

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• You dont always have control over your emotions
• Emotions drive action
• Emotions organize cognitive and behavioral
  processes
• Motivational

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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)

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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

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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.

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Innate emotions

• Basic emotions are hard-wired into our brains.
• Fight or flight reactions
• Fear
• Anger
• Lizard brain emotions

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Evidence for the innateness of (some) emotions

• Similar forms demonstrated among species
• Similar form from childhood to adulthood
  expressed before learning can take place
• Similar across cultures
• Similar in blind and sighted people.
• http//emotion.bme.duke.edu/Emotion/EmoRes/Psych/C
  ogExp/Behav.html

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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

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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

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Major emotions

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

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• Anger
• Frustration
• Control by outside force

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• Fear
• Threat
• Darkness, snakes and spiders
• Socially-learned fears

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Robert Plutchiks model of primary and derived
emtions
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Why havent 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 situationsanger for
  frustration, love for sexuality and nurturance,
  fear for self-preservation in the face of a
  threat.

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What are emotions for?

• Emotions are essential to decision-making
• Emotions can still be helpful in driving behavior
  effectively and efficiently

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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

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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

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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

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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 upespecially when a lack of
  some important condition is identified (food,
  warmth, sex)

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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

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Physical elements that affect arousal

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

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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

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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

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• 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.

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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?

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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

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• 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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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• 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

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Media influences over emotion

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

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Music and emotion

• Leonard Bernstein borrowed from Chomskys 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.

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

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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.

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• 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.

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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

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Video influences over emotion

• Pacing
• Camerawork
• Movement
• Distance
• Focus
• Color

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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