The Power of the Picture: How Narrative Film Captures Attention and Disrupts Goal Pursuit

Time perception in film viewing: A modulation of scene's duration estimates as a function of film editing

Filmmakers and editors have empirically developed techniques to ensure the spatiotemporal continuity of a film's narration. In terms of time, editing techniques (e.g., elliptical, overlapping, or cut minimization) allow for the manipulation of the perceived duration of events as they unfold on screen. More specifically, a scene can be edited to be time compressed, expanded, or real-time in terms of its perceived duration. Despite the consistent application of these techniques in filmmaking, their perceptual outcomes have not been experimentally validated. Given that viewing a film is experienced as a precise simulation of the physical world, the use of cinematic material to examine aspects of time perception allows for experimentation with high ecological validity, while filmmakers gain more insight on how empirically developed techniques influence viewers' time percept. Here, we investigated how such time manipulation techniques of an action affect a scene's perceived duration. Specifically, we presented videos depicting different actions (e.g., a woman talking on the phone), edited according to the techniques applied for temporal manipulation and asked participants to make verbal estimations of the presented scenes' perceived durations. Analysis of data revealed that the duration of expanded scenes was significantly overestimated as compared to that of compressed and real-time scenes, as was the duration of real-time scenes as compared to that of compressed scenes. Therefore, our results validate the empirical techniques applied for the modulation of a scene's perceived duration. We also found interactions on time estimates of scene type and editing technique as a function of the characteristics and the action of the scene presented. Thus, these findings add to the discussion that the content and characteristics of a scene, along with the editing technique applied, can also modulate perceived duration. Our findings are discussed by considering current timing frameworks, as well as attentional saliency algorithms measuring the visual saliency of the presented stimuli.

How narrative transportation in movies affects audiences' positive word-of-mouth: The mediating role of emotion

On the basis of the cognitive–affective–behavioral model, this study investigated the effects of narrative transportation in movies on audience emotion and positive word-of-mouth (PWOM). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the effects of the multidimensionality of narrative transportation on the multidimensionality of emotion. In this study, narrative transportation was divided into dimensions of empathy, immersion, and belief revision, and emotion was divided into pleasure and arousal. To explore the relationship between narrative transportation, emotions, and PWOM, the participants, comprising individuals with movie watching experience, completed a questionnaire on the movie that had left the deepest impression on them. The responses were analyzed through structural equation modeling. Empathy, immersion, and belief revision were significantly and positively associated with pleasure and arousal, which positively correlated with PWOM. The relationship between empathy or immersion and PWOM was partially mediated by pleasure and arousal, whereas pleasure and arousal fully mediated the association between belief revision and PWOM. Practical suggestions for filmmakers were derived from the present findings.

Individual Differences in Transportation into Narrative Drama

Transportation, the experience of feeling “transported” into a fictional world, differs widely across individuals. We examined transportation in 3 studies. Study 1 investigated links between individual differences in various measures of audience response, whereas the latter 2 studies examined links between trait measures (independent variables) and audience response (dependent variables). Study 1 found that individual differences in self-reported transportation to a film explained variation in virtually all other dependent measures, such as identification with characters, emotion, and attribution of blame for the protagonist's struggles. Group bonding after watching the film was nonlinearly related to endorphin response (as measured by pain threshold), and transportation related to these variables as well (although more weakly). Study 2 found that individual differences in celebrity worship predicted transportation, as well as tendency to identify with the characters and approve of their behavior. Study 3 demonstrated that individual differences in trait measures of sensation seeking and empathy independently predicted viewers’ transportation in 2 very different film genres. Transportation measures for both films were highly correlated, suggesting that tendency to be transported may be less genre-specific than other dependent measures. Altogether, these results illustrate the usefulness of individual differences approaches in the psychological study of fiction.

Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies

Popular movies grab and hold our attention. One reason for this is that storytelling is culturally important to us, but another is that general narrative formulae have been honed over millennia and that a derived but specific filmic form has developed and has been perfected over the last century. The result is a highly effective format that allows rapid processing of complex narratives. Using a corpus analysis I explore a physical narratology of popular movies-narrational structure and how it impacts us-to promote a theory of popular movie form. I show that movies can be divided into 4 acts-setup, complication, development, and climax-with two optional subunits of prolog and epilog, and a few turning points and plot points. In 12 studies I show that normative aspects in patterns of shot durations, shot transitions, shot scale, shot motion, shot luminance, character introduction, and distributions of conversations, music, action shots, and scene transitions reduce to 5 correlated stylistic dimensions of movies and can litigate among theories of movie structure. In general, movie narratives have roughly the same structure as narratives in any other domain-plays, novels, manga, folktales, even oral histories-but with particular runtime constraints, cadences, and constructions that are unique to the medium.

Aesthetic Chills: Knowledge-Acquisition, Meaning-Making, and Aesthetic Emotions

This article addresses the relation between aesthetic emotions, knowledge-acquisition, and meaning-making. We briefly review theoretical foundations and present experimental data related to aesthetic chills. These results suggest that aesthetic chills are inhibited by exposing the subject to an incoherent prime prior to the chill-eliciting stimulation and that a meaningful prime makes the aesthetic experience more pleasurable than a neutral or an incoherent one. Aesthetic chills induced by narrative structures seem to be related to the pinnacle of the story, to have a significant calming effect and subjects describe a strong empathy for the characters. We discuss the relation between meaning-making and aesthetic emotions at the psychological, physiological, narratological, and mathematical levels and propose a series of hypotheses to be tested in future research.