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

not that surprising

[OzRoy]

One of my favorite comedy movies is "Flying High" (or Airplane to non Australians), but those types of movies are only really great when you see it with lots of people. On your own they are kind of lame.

Re:not that surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I am, and stop calling me Shirley.

Re:not that surprising

[slyn]

I saw the midnight showing of Snakes on a Plane with like 10 of my friends the weekend before half of them went off to college last year.

It was fucking awesome. Doubly so because everyone that showed up to the midnight showing knew what the movie was supposed to be (not serious).

Everyone who I've talked to since then about the movie (who wasn't at that showing) says it sucked and was stupid, and they all have in common that they tried to watch it by themselves or with only one or two other people.

another blindingly obvious conclusion

[petes_PoV]

presumably the next grant they get (to continue their subsidised film-watching) will be to research if sad films make you melancholy and happy films make you happy.

some research departments simply have too much spare money

Re:another blindingly obvious conclusion

[zotz]

"So, why do you keep giving it to them?"

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/08/1414258

Gene Found to Explain Repeated Mistakes ???

all the best,

drew

Depends On Who's Watching With You

[vodevil]

I'm one of those people who would pay extra to have an empty theatre to myself to see a movie. The last thing I want is to hear constant chatter, or see people texting on their cell phones while watching a movie. It totally takes you out of the experience.

Re:Depends On Who's Watching With You

[Dachannien]

One of these days, you're going to be in a theater alone and confused, wishing that the loud guy three rows back was there to explain to his friend and everyone else in a ten-foot radius the obvious thing that just happened.

Confirmed by the netflix database

[tansey]

For one of our homework assignments in my data mining class, we had to come up with some interesting insights about the netflix database. One of the things I noticed was that movies rated on the weekends were significantly more likely to be rated a 1 or a 5 than during the week. My conjecture was that this is because people are more likely to watch movies with other people on the weekends and the mob mentality takes over, causing good movies to become great and bad movies to become horrible.

Re:Confirmed by the netflix database

[Loke the Dog]

Or maybe the people who watch movies in the middle of the week are people who see movies as a kind of art and few movies can really live up to that. While people who watch movies in the weekends simply see them as entertainment and nearly all movies can live up to that.

And other things.

[onion2k]

The same is true of sex.

Apparently. :(

Re:And other things.

[rucs_hack]

Sex is done in company? Wow!

er, I mean, of course it is, um...

Re:And other things.

[deniable]

I don't know. I can handle watching a movie with a group of men.

Re:And other things.

[BlueParrot]

I don't know. I can handle watching a movie with a group of men.

So can I, don't quite see your point thou ...

I'm not so sure the movie part is that important

[Bones3D_mac]

More likely, this is a common trait in humans to improve our chances of gaining acceptance with others by attempted to sympathize with the emotional state of everyone else. It's almost a conditioned reaction. For example, how many people usually break out laughing at funerals when everyone else is all sorrow or silence? Such an act would render you an outcast even without the overhead of learned manners. It's a complete and total abstraction of the majority mood.

It's probably the same reason why people also tend to not trust those who seem happy and smiling all the time.

and beer helps

[petes_PoV]

particularly with this "type" of film, the drunker you are the funnier it seems.

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

[WombatDeath]

This isn't really related to your point, but I'm reminded of a visit to my grandparents when I was about four years old. My grandfather wandered off to take a phone call, and came back into the room to announce the unexpected death of my uncle.

I collapsed into an irresistible fit of laughter. It was just a child's nervous reaction to a sudden and bewildering change of atmosphere, but some rather surprised looks were cast in the direction of the devil-child cackling away at this joyous news of death. Which, of course, just made it even worse.

Just film enjoyment?

[jez9999]

In general, humans like to share in emotions with other people, which is why groups of people tend to laugh together, cry together, smile together, get angry together, etc.

Try cheering a sports team on on your own, vs. with a group of other people, and see which feels naturally easier.

Re:Just film enjoyment?

[value_added]

I'm reminded of watching a movie years ago when I moved to LA. The neighbourhood I moved to was fairly well-to-do, but still had a certain pre-yuppie bohemian charm to it. These were the days before Starbucks was on every street corner. The local theatre, don't remember whether it was independent or part of a small chain, was fairly large and it was where the locals went.

When the film began, there were the usual previews, of course, but then a lengthy ad appeared for The LA Times. The Friday night crowd burst out in a chorus of hisses and loud booing (in response to the ad, and to the LA Times), and I was only to happy to join in. If I had been in the Westwood area (where the film industry concentrated its attention at the time), the only reaction would be the munching of popcorn. The movie itself I don't remember, but what struck me about that experience was realising that not only had I moved to the "right" neighbourhood, but also that shared public experiences could me more profound and lasting than solitary ones.

My experience was probably little different than what the ordinary folks in east Texas feel when they attend Friday services for the local religeon, high school football. By comparison, the on-line equivalent of posting emotionally-charged comments to a blog, or participating in a Slashdot flame-fest, doesn't really compare. Then again, not all things invite public participation, and not all movies should be watched in public. Local zoning and vice laws notwithstanding, I'd bet this is something that even Pee Wee Herman has learned.

This might explain some things about film critics

[Gybrwe666]

Seriously.

Many film critics are given films (even brand new ones) on DVD, rather than having to watch multiple films at a theater, whch is obviously more time consuming. Considering how out of touch some film critics seem to be sometimes, especially when it comes to comedies, it seems to follow that a critic watching a movie alone in his house would have a very different experience than going and seeing it in a crowded theater.

Now film critics are starting to make more sense...

Bill

Re:Genious.

[morgan_greywolf]

But, even on /. we knew this empirically, the so called groupthink. There's groupthink on Slashdot?

So you mean, that, like Apple may not be the greatest company on earth, 2008 may not be the year of Linux on the desktop, Vista may actually be an okay operating system, Microsoft isn't necessarily t3h 3v1l, and in Soviet Russia,
films may not necessarily enjoy you?!

Wow, that's just a lot to think about.

Re:So That Explains...

[owlnation]

His best work in my opinion is "Forgotten Silver". That's a real masterpiece, the fact that it had a Professor at a NZ film school giving lectures on Colin McKenzie the day after broadcast is hilarious. (He should, of course, have been immediately fired)

His real skill is in production though. The Lord of the Rings movies are an amazing production. To organize that many people, for that length of time, in a small country unused to filmmaking, takes serious talent. Try and organize a short movie yourself, and then bow down at the feet of Mr Jackson. It's waaay harder than you think.

Re:Funding Proposal

[zotz]

"Dr I. C. Clearly
Patently Obvious Research Labs Inc.
Bermuda."

Dude! I think you need to build some triangulation coefficients into your funding requests and into your proposed studies.

all the best,

drew

well-known in comedy

[lawpoop]

This phenomenon is well-known in the comedy world. If they can afford it, a comedian will oftentimes have a warmer in the crowd, who just laughs at the appropriate moments. I heard a Charlie Murphy interview where he talks about doing this for Eddie when he was starting out.

Sounds like wikifriends

[The_mad_linguist]

http://xkcd.com/185/ beat the researches to it.

Re:Ever hear of a...

[kisrael]

The thing is, laugh tracks aren't just a cynical way of trying to make a show "more funny" or being told when to laugh; they were meant in response to semi-legitimate fears of people feeling lonely as they watched a show alone...

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.