What do you feel when you watch a movie? film relies heavily on the power of emotion, producing both empathy and pity. It helps the spectator to connect emotionally with the characters. Emotional empathy may be defined as the capacity to empathize with another person’s emotions. It’s more than just feeling sorry for people; it’s really caring about and empathizing with their plight. We feel a broad spectrum of emotions when watching movies, which might impact us even if we’re not aware of it. As humans, we can empathize with others and form moral judgments by seeing ourselves in their shoes. This has caused desensitization of people who view them, particularly adolescents, as they are triggered to think that it is real life. These adolescents are thought to engage in more violent and antisocial conduct as a result of this. When media exposure was compared to community violence in a single research of older teenagers, community violence was shown to be more significantly associated with aggressiveness than violent media. Kaplan, however, argue that these aren’t really emotions. According to her theory, emotional contagion is what happens when someone else experiences our feelings. She makes the case that emotional contagion-based reactions from viewers are distinct from other types of emotional reactions and should be recognized as such. This article will discuss the function of emotions in films and their role in the desensitization of adolescents into aggression and violence.

Interpersonal violence, which is defined as the purposeful use of threatened or real physical force against another person and which may or may not end in damage, death, or psychological harm, is common among adolescents and emerging adults in the United States. There is more evidence to suggest that watching violent movies reduces one’s capacity for empathy (Tarasov, 2018). Male college students were shown to have less empathy for the victims of violence after seeing sexually explicit films. Studies in the lab and in the field have shown a drop in helpful behavior after seeing violent movies, which may represent a loss in empathy. For example, children between the ages of 9 and 11 who were randomly assigned to see a violent movie waited longer than their classmates watching a peaceful film to seek aid in a dispute with other children (Tarasov, 2018). However, the issue arises: Is this a genuine expression of one’s actual feelings? Kaplan relies on the occurrence of “emotional contagion” to argue against “intellectualist” theories of emotions and how they affect adolescents.

In Kaplan’s definition, “emotional contagion” refers to the transmission of one person’s feelings to another. When we watch a movie, she asserts, the whole process occurs rapidly, and we aren’t aware of it, but she feels empathy takes time and requires awareness. Lauren Wispe defines emotional contagion as “the automatic spread of emotions without any cognitive knowledge of where those sensations originally originated. Contagion is mostly a product of motor mimicry, which initiates it and subsequently activates it and provides feedback. Electromyography (EMG) protocols were utilized to examine facial expressions by Ulf Dimberg, who discovered that participants’ facial expressions mimic the emotional expressions of their target persons. As a result, short-term increases in cortisol and blood pressure are expected after exposure to violence in films. A long-term rise in baseline levels of cortisol and blood pressure may result from recurrent activation of the physiological stress response, which in turn may contribute to numerous physiological and psychological issues such as hypertension and depression. Resting blood pressure and cortisol levels were greater in adolescents exposed to violence, as predicted. It’s interesting to note that the later research drew their participants from poorer, higher-crime metropolitan neighborhoods than the earlier ones, indicating that persistently low levels of physiological stress system activation may be linked to prolonged exposure to violence and stressors of this kind (Tarasov, 2018). There may thus be a correlation between exposure to violence and physiological functioning that is nonlinear.

When we watch a movie, our facial expressions alter, and we get a sense of how the characters are feeling. Researchers observed that an imitator mimicked another person by copying their face. For this reason, the imitator’s emotional experience and physiological changes are influenced by replicating this facial expression, which they subsequently repeat (Kaplan 2011). When watching a film, the audience is more likely to be affected by the characters’ emotions they are seeing (Kaplan, 2011) than when watching a real-life encounter. High amounts of exposure to real-life and cinematic violence seem to be linked to lower levels of emotional distress, emotional empathy, and physiological response, indicating a state of emotional and physiological desensitization. According to Kaplan, this moment is extremely likely to generate emotional contagion in the spectator since the audience can already emulate the topic and comprehend the characters’ feelings after only a few minutes of the opening scene and minimum information. 

Movies’ emotional contagiousness and other emotional processes vary greatly. To Kaplan, empathy is a complicated process that involves both intellect and emotion. We may say that empathy is dynamic and multifaceted due to the fact that it has both emotive and cognitive components (Kaplan 2011). Ideas, beliefs, and perceptions aren’t necessary for emotional contagion since it is essentially involuntary, based on direct sensory experience, and triggered by autonomic processes that need no thoughts, beliefs, or perceptions (Kaplan, 2011). This might explain why children nowadays are becoming more desensitized and are involving themselves in violent acts and aggression, films being one of the main reasons why it is so. However, one essential idea that may characterize aspects of the film-viewing experience is emotional contagion, which needs to be further investigated.

 

 

Reference:

Kaplan, E.A., 2011, Empathy and Trauma Culture: Imaging Catastrophe, Empathy Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Amy Coplan & Peter Goldie, editors., Oxford University Press., New York, New York.

Tarasov, K. A. (2018). Representing violence in cinema industries. Sociological Studies, 8(8), 65-73.