While watching a film, the brain is busy deciphering the behaviors of the characters and managing the resulting emotions. Several psychological experiments have shown that this training develops empathy
You look a film for fun, yet a movie really is much more than just entertainment. Whether you watch it in the cinema on a big screen, or at home on your PC or television monitor, you are never just relaxing, but engaging in the brain in a complex work of identification, in the difficult task of training to enter the minds and emotions of other people. A work that has been important in helping to develop fundamental social skills for human beings. A recent research carried out by Emanuele Castano of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Trento shows how to watch films, especially if it is a work that requires a certain level of analysis of the characters and the plot – roughly corresponding to those which are called arthouse films – improves the ability to represent oneself mental states of others. The research, published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, came to the conclusion that watching this type of film helps to better understand what another person thinks, feels, hopes, what emotions specific Castano is experiencing. A capacity that has played a key role in our evolutionary history, making it possible to develop those peculiar characteristics of great sociality that characterize our species.
Author and commercial films
Upstream of this study is previous research in the human sciences area that explored the ways in which stories are told, and, more importantly, how characters are represented. however, it is important to distinguish the effect generated by arthouse films from more commercial and of lesser depth, which are often referred to as Hollywood. In so-called Hollywood films, the meaning of the lines uttered by the characters is usually immediately understandable and serves to inform the viewer of the characters’ intentions or beliefs. Castano clarifies. Furthermore, in this type of film the viewer “experiences” the mental states of the characters. Their expressions facials are often marked and displayed closely, so that they can be clearly decoded, probably through simulation processes or even directly, as if the viewer were experiencing the same situation as the character firsthand. Processes well illustrated in the book by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra The empathic screen. Cinema and neuroscience (Raffaello Cortina, in which it is explained how the films almost literally put us in the role of the characters, for example through specific shots, thus facilitating our psychological and emotional identification. Based on my research, I propose that in this regard there are some differences between Hollywood films and arthouse films underlines Emanuele Castano. In the latter, the viewer is not invited to live the experience of the characters, but rather to analyze it, to look for its meaning that is not made obvious and immediately assimilable to one’s own experience. While the first makes the viewer one with the characters and their minds, the second keeps him at a distance from the characters and rather stimulates the imagination starting from ideas, from the ambiguity of the said and the unspoken. Being human beings, obviously the imagination is primarily aimed at understanding the intentions, mental states, emotions of the characters, and this is the reason why I have suggested that these films train the spectator’s ability to enter mental states and emotions. of other people. A specific ability which in psychological terms is called theory of mind.
The experiment
The experiment conducted by Castano was carried out involving over 300 people, recruited online in the United States. Participants were assigned to watch the first 20 minutes of Hollywood movies (e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean) or arthouse films (such as The pianist). Participants then underwent a series of tests, some of which measured variables such as how the main character was perceived, others assessed performance on Theory of Mind tests. I have used two in particular test. One the Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which makes it possible to evaluate the accuracy in the inference of the mental states of others, based exclusively on the analysis of a person’s eye region. The other test, of a very different nature but also used to measure the theory of mind, consists in judging the work of people within a series of scenarios presented to the participants. Referring to his previous research, Castano found a correspondence between the effects of films and those of literature, also in this case with a different effect between cultured literature – literary novels – and literature, so to speak, of escape. A distinction discussed and often contested in the literary world, but which has allowed us to hypothesize that the characters of literary novels, being less immediately understandable than those of popular novels, stimulate more in the reader some skills of social cognition, including precisely the theory of mind. The next step of the research will be to try to establish a direct dialogue with film production, with scriptwriters, directors and editors, in order to relate the processes I describe with structural aspects of the production of the films he concludes.
September 15, 2021 (change September 15, 2021 | 19:02)
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