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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."
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.
some research departments simply have too much spare money
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
The same is true of sex.
:(
Apparently.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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.
8==8 Bones 8==8
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.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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
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.
My blog
http://xkcd.com/185/ beat the researches to it.
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...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death