Ed S. Tan

Film As An Emotion Machine (Les's Communication Series)

Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film

Frank Hakemulder

Moniek M. Kuijpers

Miruna M. Doicaru

Katalin Bálint

Narrative Absorption brings together research from the social sciences and Humanities to solve a number of mysteries: Most of us will have had those moments, of being totally absorbed in a book, a movie, or computer game. Typically we do not have any idea about how we ended up in such a state. Nor do we fully realize how we might have changed as we return for the fictional worlds we have visited. The feeling of being absorbed is one of the most illusive and transient feelings, but also one that motivates audiences to spend considerable amounts of time in narrative worlds, and one that is central to our understanding of the effects of narratives on beliefs and behavior. Key specialists inform the reader of this book about the nature of the peculiar state of consciousness during episodes of absorption, the perception of absorption in history, the role of absorption in meaningful experiences with narratives, the relation with related phenomena such as suspense and identification, issues of measurement, and the practical implications, for instance in education-entertainment. Various fields have worked separately on topics of absorption, albeit using different terminology and methods, but having reached a high level of development and complexity in understanding absorption. Now is the time to bring them together. This volume will be a point of reference for years to come.

Narrative Absorption

Conceptualization of narrative absorption. Beyond metaphors and traditions: Exploring the conceptual boundaries of narrative engagement / Helena Bilandzic and Rick Busselle -- Towards a new understanding of absorbing reading experiences / Moniek M. Kuijpers, Frank Hakemulder, Katalin Balint, Miruna Doicaru and Ed Tan -- Narrative persuasion: Effects of transporting stories on attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors / Kaitlin S. Fitzgerald and Melanie C. Green -- Immersion into narrative and poetic worlds: A neurocognitive poetics perspective / Arthur M. Jacobs and Jana Lüdtke -- Into film: Does absorption in a movie's story world pose a paradox? / Ed Tan, Miruna M. Doicaru, Frank Hakemulder, Katalin Balint and Moniek M. Kuijpers -- Spellbound in darkness: Narrative absorption discussed by film theory / Frank Kessler -- Antecedents of identification: Character, text, and audiences / Jonathan Cohen and Nurit Tal-Or -- Empirical studies on narrative absorption. Identifying with in-game characters: Exploring player articulations of identification and presence / Jasper van Vught and Gareth Schott -- The effect of suspense structure on felt suspense and narrative absorption in literature and film / Katalin Bálint, Moniek M. Kuijpers and Miruna M. Doicaru -- Elaboration, emotion, and transportation: Implications for conceptual analysis and textual features / Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi -- Forms of absorption that facilitate the aesthetic and explanatory effects of literary reading / Don Kuiken and Shawn Douglas -- Outcomes of narrative absorption. Absorption and meaningfulness: Examining the relationship between eudaimonic media use and engagement / Mary Beth Oliver, Arienne Ferchaud, Chun Yang, Yan Huang and Erica Bailey -- The role of absorption processes in narrative health communication / Anneke de Graaf and Lonneke van Leeuwen -- Absorption in narrative fiction and its possible impact on social abilities / Navona Calarco, Katrina Fong, Marina Rain and Raymond A. Mar

Introduced one hundred years ago, film has since become part of our lives. For the past century, however, the experience offered by fiction films has remained a mystery. Questions such as why adult viewers cry and shiver, and why they care at all about fictional characters -- while aware that they contemplate an entirely staged scene -- are still unresolved. In addition, it is unknown why spectators find some film experiences entertaining that have a clearly aversive nature outside the cinema. These and other questions make the psychological status of emotions allegedly induced by the fiction film highly problematic. Earlier attempts to answer these questions have been limited to a few genre studies. In recent years, film criticism and the theory of film structure have made use of psychoanalytic concepts which have proven insufficient in accounting for the diversity of film induced affect. In contrast, academic psychology -- during the century of its existence -- has made extensive study of emotional responses provoked by viewing fiction film, but has taken the role of film as a natural stimulus completely for granted. The present volume bridges the gap between critical theories of film on the one hand, and recent psychological theory and research of human emotion on the other, in an attempt to explain the emotions provoked by fiction film. This book integrates insights on the narrative structure of fiction film including its themes, plot structure, and characters with recent knowledge on the cognitive processing of natural events, and narrative and person information. It develops a theoretical framework for systematically describing emotion in the film viewer. The question whether or not film produces genuine emotion is answered by comparing affect in the viewer with emotion in the real world experienced by persons witnessing events that have personal significance to them. Current understanding of the psychology of emotions provides the basis for identifying critical features of the fiction film that trigger the general emotion system. Individual emotions are classified according to their position in the affect structure of a film -- a larger system of emotions produced by one particular film as a whole. Along the way, a series of problematic issues is dealt with, notably the reality of the emotional stimulus in film, the identification of the viewer with protagonists on screen, and the necessity of the viewer's cooperation in arriving at a genuine emotion. Finally, it is argued that film-produced emotions are genuine emotions in response to an artificial stimulus. Film can be regarded as a fine-tuned machine for a continuous stream of emotions that are entertaining after all. The work paves the way for understanding and, in principle, predicting emotions in the film viewer using existing psychological instruments of investigation. Dealing with the problems of film-induced affect and rendering them accessible to formal modeling and experimental method serves a wider interest of understanding aesthetic emotion -- the feelings that man-made products, and especially works of art, can evoke in the beholder.

Ed S. Tan

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