Media and emotion
Lightly covered terrain
Emotion and entertainment
• Entertainment usually is tied to being ‘moved’
by a media experience
– Arousal
– Arousal is tied to emotion
What do we mean by “emotion”?
• Commonly understood but very hard to define
Defining emotion
• “Emotion is complex, and the term has no single
universally accepted definition. Emotions are mental
states that arise spontaneously, rather than through
conscious effort.”
• Another view states that “Emotions are physical
expressions, often involuntary, related to feelings,
perceptions or beliefs about elements, objects or
relations between them, in reality or in the
imagination.”
– Wikipedia
Our view
• Let’s argue that an emotion is a complex of
beliefs, arousal and valence of affect.
– You don’t always have control over your emotions
– Emotions drive action
– Emotions organize cognitive and behavioral
processes
• Motivational
• “Sloman and others explain that the need to face a
changing and unpredictable world makes emotions
necessary for any intelligent system (natural or
artificial) with multiple motives and limited
capacities and resources.”
– Current research suggests that emotion makes up an
essential part of human decision-making, including longterm planning
• Wikipedia
Views of emotion
• Scholarly views concerning emotion range along a
number of dimensions:
– Some argue that no special system exists to
process emotions, while others see special brain
functions and structures for emotion
– Some think emotions are immediate and prior to
thinking, while others see emotions as a result of
thinking
– Some see emotions as separate from reasoning
while others see them as tied together
– Some see emotions as innate while others think
they are learned
Influence of culture
• “specific emotional responses, as well as
a group's interpretation of their
significance, may be influenced by
cultural norms of propriety. For instance,
certain emotions such as love, hate, and
the desire for vengeance are treated very
differently in differing societies.”
– Wikipedia
• Contrary to this view, Paul Ekman has shown
that at least some facial expressions and their
corresponding emotions are universal across
human cultures and are not culturally
determined. These universal emotions include
anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.
evidence for innateness of
(some) emotions
1) similar form across 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
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.
• A broad consensus has emerged on what we might
call adequacy conditions [for] any theory of emotion.
– emotions are typically conscious phenomena; yet
– they typically involve more pervasive bodily manifestations
than other conscious states;
– they vary along a number of dimensions: intensity, type
and range of intentional objects, etc.
– they are reputed to be antagonists of rationality; but also
– they play an indispensable role in determining the quality
of life;
– they contribute crucially to defining our ends and
priorities;
– they play a crucial role in the regulation of social
life;
– they protect us from an excessively slavish
devotion to narrow conceptions of rationality;
– they have a central place in moral education and
the moral life.
• Wikipedia
Relations to others
• Much of emotion is based on our relationships
with others
– Interactions with others
– Observation of others
– Thoughts about others
Empathy and forms of attachment
• Empathy—the experience of understanding the
viewpoint of another
• Sympathy—feelings for another based on their
experience or situation
• Parasocial interaction—the feeling that one
interacts with a media persona
• Identification
Emotion is a hallmark of many media
presentations
• “Tear-jerker”
• Sports
• Horror films
However . . .
• Our understanding of emotion is pretty limited
• Our understanding of the role of media in
affecting emotions is more limited yet
• The research on media and emotions tends to
focus on either love or fear
Media influences over emotion
• Para-social interaction, identification with
characters in story
– Triumph, defeat, joy, sorrow, etc. of character then
affects audience as would knowing someone going
through the same
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
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.
– Emotions are aroused, but do not lead to a felt
need for behavioral 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?
– There is no convincing explanation
• 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, as opposed to a
belief, be something that occasions 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.
Media influences over emotion
• Sound/music
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Major/minor key
Melody/dissonance
Volume
Dynamics
Speed
Timbre
Sharpness
Orchestration/richness
• Sad
Tragedy
Diary
Another Auld Lang Syne
Fast car
• Happy
Wild Night
Fun, Fun, Fun
Officer Krupke
Excited
In America
Rain King
Poignant
• Fast Car
• There’s a Place for Us
• A Pirate Looks at Forty
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.
Manfred Clynes
• Clynes has tried to find a way to describe musical
communication by making connections between neurophysics,
gesture and emotion.
• In 1977, Manfred Clynes, a concert pianist and
neurophysiologist, presented his theory of Sentics, "the study
of genetically programmed dynamic forms of emotional
expression." During the 1950s, Clynes had invented the term
"cyborg" to refer to creatures who have augmented their
biological systems with automatic feedback controls. He
formulated several theories about sensory perception,
including his idea about essentic forms, precise dynamic forms
that are characteristic of each emotion.
• One of Clynes’ big breakthroughs was that emotions
are not fixed states, but rather transitions (spatiotemporal curves) with particular trajectories. He
related these forms to musical structure through a
theory of inner pulse, which he felt was unique to
each composer – a kind of personal signature encoded
in the shapes of the pulses on many levels
simultaneously. For Clynes, the inner experience of
music is reflected when the electrical impulses in the
brain are mechanically transduced, for example, by
the expressive shape of finger pressure.
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.
• David Epstein makes a case that the kind of variation
in musical structures such as tempo and dynamics
constitute movement, and that this movement is
highly correlated with emotional responses to music.
• 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 considered this phenomenon to
be fundamental to music, and wrote that mood
shifts in music are faster and more contrasting
than they are in real life.
Video influences over emotion
• Pacing
• Camerawork
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Movement
Distance
Focus
Color
• A team led by Simone Dalla Bella tested children
ranging in age from three to eight, as well as adults,
by playing musical excerpts for them and asking
whether the music was happy or sad. The participants
listened to 32 pieces of classical music, 16 of which
were determined to be “happy” and 16 “sad” in a
previous study. In addition, the same pieces were
systematically altered by changing mode (from major
to minor key or vice versa), tempo, or both. Sad
music is generally played in a minor key at a slow
tempo, and happy music is usually played fast and in
a major key.
• The researchers found that when happy music
was slowed down to the same tempo as sad
music, it no longer sounded musical; likewise
for sad music played as fast as happy music, so
they settled on a moderate tempo in between
the happy and sad tempi (about 84 beats per
minute), and adjusted both the happy and sad
music to be played at this rate.
• Dalla Bella and her colleagues argue that the ability to
understand mode as an expression of emotion is learned
between the ages of five and six, but they are less certain about
when tempo becomes associated with emotion. It’s possible
that the reason three- and four-year-olds were unable to
perform the task is related to not understanding the procedure
of pointing to happy and sad faces, or to unfamiliarity with the
classical music samples. What is certainly clear is that sixyear-olds have mastered matching both tempo and mode
changes to their corresponding emotions.
• Dalla Bella, S., Peretz, I., Rousseau, L., & Gosselin, N. (2001).
A developmental study of the affective value of tempo and
mode in music. Cognition, 80, B1-B10.
Emotion in Advertising
• One of the most powerful tools for advertisers
is emotion
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Memorable
Persuasive
Available through several advertising media
Attention-getting
Emotion in advertising
Show what people love
• Almost everyone loves country, family, and children. And we
all respond to the bond of love between mother and child.
Patriotic themes work as well in China as they do in America
or Russia.
• In some countries, people react emotionally to animals, such as
dogs or cats or tiger cubs -- especially babies of the species.
• McDonald's, the beef burger king, frequently uses kids in their
ads, in part to transfer the positive feeling people have about
children to the restaurant. Cows find these ads absolutely
disgusting, but who cares how cows feel? They don't have any
money.
– © Steven Lorin McNamara. All rights reserved.
Use music that elicits
an emotional response
• An excellent example was a television commercial for Hong
Kong Telecom produced by J. Walter Thompson shortly
before the hand-over from Britain to China. The visual track
cut back and forth between things that were once only
imagined and then finally achieved. One such sequence
showed a grainy old black and white shot of a guy with
homemade bird wings strapped to his back. Looks like the
1920s. He jumps off a rock and falls flat on his face. Next you
see the space shuttle lift off.
• What made the spot great was the sound track, "Imagine" by
John Lennon. It was voted best television commercial that year
in Hong Kong.
Use stories that have emotional impact
• Every society, every community has experienced
triumphs and tragedies. These shared experiences can
be powerful emotional triggers.
• An athlete weeps on the victory stand at the Olympics
while her national anthem is played. Or a successful
businessman reflects on the sacrifices and hardships
his father endured to build the company.
• On a more general level, we all share a similar
response to emotionally charged situations. The birth
of a child. War. Weddings. Political or religious
conflict.
Use emotional themes, style and mood
• You can effectively employ emotional elements in
ads for everything from banking services to personal
computers, fashion to fragrances, soup to soap suds.
• The Calvin Klein Obsession TVC, "Beyond reason is
obsession," is a portrayal of a man obsessed with a
woman. The art direction, music and story work
together to trigger feelings - perhaps stir recollections
- of passionate love.
• This approach relies more on style and mood to break
through the clutter, to grab attention. More on the
visual. Less on the story line.
• You can see, that instead of persuading with a feature or
benefit, ESPs persuade with a feeling, with emotion.
• Tip: The use of an ESP is usually a strategic rather than
tactical decision. So think it through carefully. And make sure
your client is committed to the campaign.
• This crazy little thing called love is like dust in the wind.
Feelings are transitory. They come, then go. So sure, you can
use an emotional visual or headline or storyline to grab an
audience, to break through the clutter. But see if you can
achieve a transfer of good feelings to the client's product. One
way is to get the company or service or product into the story,
as the focus of the feeling, as the hero.
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