Are movies tricking your brain into empathizing with Characters?

Summary of: Are Movies Tricking Your Brain Into Empathizing With Characters? By Greg Miller.

Miller reported in his recent article, that movies can cause “embodied empathy” and “mental empathy” (Hendler, 2014) effects on your brain based on the movie scenes and what is being shown. He observed several scenes from different movies, one from The Black Swan, and a few from a 1998 drama called The Stepmom. The one from The Black Swan was a visually disturbing clip, where the viewers see the main character, played by Natalie Portman, hallucinating and having schizophrenic, dark behavior. This movie clip makes people have strange brain patterns, with some patterns resembling the brain of people with schizophrenia. This scene causes viewers to have a large amount mental empathy, meaning they really feel for Natalie Portman’s character, and in a way step outside of themselves to see how she is feeling and thinking. There is only a small amount of embodied empathy shown in the watcher’s brains, and only when the character does something physically harming to herself. Embodied empathy, in Talma Hendler’s words, is “the more visceral in-the-moment empathy you might feel when you see someone get punched in the guts.” This pattern, where the brain has much more mental empathy than embodied empathy even when a visceral experience is being shown, is similar to the patterns shown in schizophrenia patients. Neuroscientist Talma Hendler states, “It’s as if they’re having to think through the emotional impact of situations that other people grasp more intuitively and automatically” (Miller, 2014).

I think this article is extremely interesting. It’s also shocking, because you don’t usually think movies could really affect your pattern of thinking and make such huge changes in your brain patterns. It makes me wonder if scary movies might affect your brain in a strange way also, since they are intense and probably make you feel lots of mental emotion. This might lead an average person to have schizophrenic thoughts. Their results also make me wonder, if you showed a depressed person an extremely uplifting and happy movie, would they rethink their thoughts on life to be happier or just become happier people? And vice versa with depressing movies? This article left me with lots of questions and interest in how other movies affect the brain, and I really liked the subject of this article.

Miller, G. (2014, September 2). How Movies Trick Your Brain Into Empathizing With Characters. Retrieved September 11, 2014, from Wired Science website: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-science-empathizing-with-characters/