Study Finds Film Enjoyment Is Contagious

Hugh Pickens writes "A report from Science Daily says that scientists have proven that the presence of other people may enhance our movie-watching experiences by influencing and gradually synchronizing viewer emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant's evaluation of the overall experience — the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie. In a series of experiments, researchers found that people watching a film together appeared to evaluate the film within the same broad mood and another study found that synchrony of evaluations can be traced to glances at the other person during the film and adoption of the observed expressions. 'By mimicking expressions, people catch each other's moods leading to a shared emotional experience. That feels good to people and they attribute that good feeling to the quality of the movie,' said one researcher."

Comments

Re:I'm not so sure the movie part is that importan

[Anonymous Coward]

Laughter is an important bonding mechanism, that's why we're born with it.

I've found that laughing during bondage just gets me whipped even more.

Re:Genious.

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

There's groupthink on Slashdot?

Oh god yes. Certain subjects like Apple, Linux, and MS maybe experiencing change currently, but some subjects are particularly polarised. The viewpoint forms a feedback loop, where the only comments to be moderated highly share that viewpoint, and any reasonable "devil's advocates" (as they must be called) are moderated down. When browsing, slashdotters see no opposing viewpoints, and even if they do, the posts sound so aggressively defensive that they completely alienate the reader. The cycle only stops when the viewpoint gets to such extremities that the moderators can't ignore the reason in other posts, and questioning the viewpoint becomes in vogue. That's precisely where the MS groupthink is now.