Movies can also help you release your emotions and act as a catharsis, sometimes helping you express some emotions you've been having a hard time expressing,” she says. And—depending on the movie—it can amplify positive emotions, Schiff says. “Movies can motivate you to change or improve things in your life.”
However, movies can affect society in both positive and negative ways. They can help the economy grow, inspire individuals, and expand our basic knowledge of the world around us. Movies can also create violence and bad habits, can make people greedier, and can send a bad message to the public.
This release of emotions can have a cathartic effect and also make it easier for a person to become more comfortable in expressing their emotions. This can be invaluable during counseling as well as in “real life.”
Studies suggest that watching movies can increase our emotional intelligence and also help in improving social connectivity. A study conducted by psychologists at Oklahoma University studied the relation between fictional drama and emotions.
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Why do movies make us emotional?
So, although oxytocin may be targeted biologically at ensuring strong social bonds, it also serves to enhance emotional responses. Crying in the movies is a sign that oxytocin has been triggered by the connections you feel due to vicarious social experience.
Movies can also help you release your emotions and act as a catharsis, sometimes helping you express some emotions you've been having a hard time expressing,” she says. And—depending on the movie—it can amplify positive emotions, Schiff says. “Movies can motivate you to change or improve things in your life.”
This can be described as a tripling down effect. The strengths that are portrayed in the film help the viewer to recognize such strengths inside themselves, so that they put the strengths to good use for their own lives, and so they feel better and more connected to people and the world.
Studies have shown that watching a movie can increase our levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. This dopamine release can make us feel happier and more content, improving our overall mood.
Films encourage us to take action. Our favourite characters, superheroes, teach us life lessons. They give us ideas and inspiration to do everything for the better instead of just sitting around, waiting for things to go their way.
If you have, you are not alone: you are likely experiencing narrative transportation, a phenomenon whereby audience members feel so involved in a storyline that it can influence their attitudes and behavior in reality, even after they have finish watching a film or reading a story.
If you feel this way, then you may be happy to know that watching a movie can actually have unexpected benefits: According to psychologists, movies may help us grow our strengths and become better people. Cinematherapy—or using movies as an adjunct to psychotherapy—has been around for many years.
We are transported to a different time and place and can just focus on the present moment for a short time. This gives our brains a much-needed rest from “the usual.” Movies bring us a sense of relief, even if they stress us out first.
“Mood” can refer either to the atmosphere of a story or the emotional state of a character. Mood and emotion are heavily linked, but they aren't the same. In writing, there is a lot of overlap and the best writers (for fiction or film) understand that relationship and use it to tell more cohesive stories.
Your attention is captured and emotions elicited by the movie's story. Oxytocin is then associated with heightened feelings of empathy and compassion, further intensifying feelings of social connectedness and you pay even further attention to the social cues of the characters in the movie.
Feel good movies are not intellectual, they are not provocative, they are not daring, but there is an authenticity to the escapism it provides. It reminds the audience that fun, lightheartedness, and enjoyment are not bad things.
What is depersonalization-derealization disorder? Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD) often shows up with other mental health conditions. It happens when you feel like you're watching your life from outside your body. It can feel like you're watching a movie or a dream.
Great films help us understand the world, history, and one another. They have the ability to reach a level of truth that we can feel in our bones. When a great actor delivers a line, we believe them. When a beloved character dies, we mourn them.
But movies are incredibly powerful and influential. They help us see the world through the eyes of others and to understand things that were previously alien. We empathise with the characters, see their struggles up close and will them to success.
Perhaps the most obvious and recurring theme is the duality of human nature, as symbolized here by the doppelgängers. There's a reason why 11:11, a double of doubles, pops up everywhere. The concept of battling our mirror images has been around since humans first started telling stories.
Watching a movie is much more easily consumable way rather than reading a book. A motion picture is more visual and easier to remember, compare with written works like books. Reading can push your imagination cause you'll be a part of the story, yet a movie helps you visualize the situation easily.
Film matters for the same reason all art matters – because it embodies and conveys the values and beliefs of the culture within which and for which it is made. Popular art forms, such as film, are of special importance because they speak to the most central of those values and beliefs.
A film – also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick – is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images.
Its central metaphor of meeting a literal evil twin of yourself certainly can be read as a commentary on race, but it's also a pretty brilliant commentary on class, on capitalism, on gender, and on the lasting effects of trauma or mental illness.
