How to Make Your Audience Feel — Emotion Theory in Movies

Emotions, how we feel them, and how we perceive them are the backbone of the human experience. For a film to be effective, it must move an audience emotionally. If a viewer leaves a theater feeling nothing, they'll likely consider the movie a failure. - That movie sucked. - Using emotional theories developed by psychologists, filmmakers can understand why and how they can affect their audience's psyches. This is how to create emotion in film. Before we start the waterworks, remember to subscribe to StudioBinder and click the bell to stay in the know on all our filmmaking videos. We'll be spoiling the following movies. Now, let's start feeling. - Maybe in a while when I'm not so emotional. Give you a week or two to change your attitude. - Modern psychology has long been preoccupied with understanding emotion. In particular, psychologists have sought to answer two questions. Where do emotions come from? And how can they be categorized? For our purposes, we'll be focusing on the first question. Evolutionary psychologists argue that basic emotions come from natural selection. Emotions help with decision making and motivation. Socializing and memory all are crucial to survival. According to psychologist Klaus Scherer, there are five different components of emotion. Cognitive appraisal, where the brain identifies an emotion. Bodily symptoms of emotion. Action tendencies, or how we react to emotion. Expression. And feelings, how the emotion is experienced. How psychologists understand the way humans come to feel an emotion has evolved over time. Early emotional theorists, William James and Carl Lang, argued that emotions are a result of physiological reactions to events. For example, I'm sweaty, so I must be nervous. Later, psychologists started to argue that the process was a bit more complex. - I'm afraid things are a little more complicated than that.