Catching Characters Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film

The opening sequence of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) elicits powerful emotions in most spectators. Many of these emotions are generated by our understanding of what the soldiers portrayed in the film were doing and what its impact would be, our knowledge of how poor their odds of survival were, and our sympathy for them. Yet some of our affective responses to the sequence are less the result of sophisticated psychological processes than of automatic, involuntary reactions to what we are perceiving. As we watch and listen to what is happening on screen, we immediately begin to experience feelings that mirror those of the characters. During the beginning of the Omaha Beach sequence, we see different groups of soldiers riding in amphibious landing crafts. The camera shows us several characters but does not focus on any one soldier in particular. There are no cutaway shots showing us what the characters see, and there is almost no dialogue to tell us about the characters’ identities, relationships, thoughts, or feelings. In spite of our lack of information, we have an immediate emotional response to what we perceive. While the soldiers are still in the boats, we are presented with eight close-ups in a row of different soldiers’ faces. Some of the characters express fear, some anticipation, some anxiety, and others depressed resignation. While watching them, most spectators end up experiencing the same sorts of feelings that the characters are experiencing. This kind of mimicry is a result of emotional contagion, an automatic and involuntary affective process that can occur when we observe others experiencing emotions. In this paper, I examine the role of emotional contagion in our affective engagement with narrative fiction film, focusing in particular on how spectator responses based on emotional contagion differ from those based on more sophisticated emotional processes. Cognitive film theory has produced a rich literature on spectators’ emotional responses to narrative fiction films, but almost all of it has focused on sophisticated emotional processes involving the imagination or cognitive evaluations. More primitive emotional processes and reactions, like emotional contagion, have received far less attention. Emotional contagion is a significant feature of spectators’ emotional engagement for at least two reasons. First, because emotional contagion requires direct sensory engagement and involves automatic processes, it is unique to our experience of audiovisual narratives and thus represents one way in which our emotional engagement with film narratives differs from our emotional engagement with literary narratives. Second, because emotional contagion responses do not involve beliefs or the imagination but are based on automatic and involuntary processes, spectators’ experiences of emotional contagion will be virtually identical to real world experiences of emotional contagion. I begin by briefly explaining emotional contagion and the processes involved in it. Next, I consider how film elicits emotional contagion. I then argue that spectator responses based on emotional contagion are unique and should be clearly distinguished from responses based on Catching Characters’ Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film