Beggar_Man wrote:
Sparrowrose wrote:
I cry at some movies. Movies that make you cry are engineered to make you cry. There is a careful selection of music (or silence) and the actors are carefully orchestrating a scene that makes it very clear what is happening and how it is painful. Often the characters will say very poignant things that are engineered to stir up your feelings. It's different from everyday life because there are no musical cues to help you know what's going on and people rarely say poetic or poignant things to drive home the tragedy of their situation. Often, people say nothing at all because they assume you understand how tragic their feelings are and will empathize with them. In short, they expect you to "read their mind" and feel disappointed or angry when you are unable to do so and cannot offer them the sort of comfort they were expecting from you.
Movies are very different from everyday life.
I'm going to cut and paste something I wrote yesterday in my cousin's facebook that pertains to this topic of empathy and whether we have it or not:
Generally, researchers in the past said that there was a lack of empathy because autistic people did not respond the same way non-autistic people did.
What's now realized is that there are two kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Autistic people are hindered in cognitive empathy due to mindblindness. That is to say: how can one express empathy if one does not realize that suffering is occuring?
Because autistic people have greater difficulty in reading emotional messages from other people's faces, bodies, and voices and because autistic people have greater difficulty understanding many "typical" responses to situations (e.g. if an autistic person prefers to spend a lot of time alone and never feels like they get enough alone time, it's harder to recognize that someone sitting alone might be lonely) the *expression* of empathy cannot be realized because there is no *cognition* of a situation of suffering.
But when researchers have controlled for that by thoroughly explaining the situation to all subjects, autistic and non-autistic, they discovered that, in general, people on the autism spectrum actually have a greater empathetic response (as measured by body readings such as breathing rate, heartbeat, skin reaction, etc. as well as measured by self-reporting of feelings of empathy) to the stress and suffering of others than non-autistic people.
In short, autistic people are impaired in the area of cognitive empathy but exceed non-autistic people in the area of affective empathy (although the non-researcher may not realize this due to the "flattened affect" many autistic people have, making it nearly as difficult for non-autistic people to read emotions from observing autistic people as it is for autistic people to read emotions from observing non-autistic people.)
So theoretically removing the soundtrack from these moments in films that are making people well up would also prevent said welling up?
It would certainly mitigate it.
I have a couple of DVDs that offer the option of watching the movie as is, with just the music soundtrack and nothing else, or with everything else and no music soundtrack. Studying them was very educational for me. I learned that there are music parts in movies that are very strange when listened to by themselves as just music (while viewing the action or not) and I really got a feel for just how much the music adds to a movie. A soundtrack is a tremendous tool for manipulating the audience's emotions and expectations and the music really moves the story along and fills in a huge part of the message the director was attempting to convey.
_________________
"In the end, we decide if we're remembered for what happened to us or for what we did with it."
-- Randy K. Milholland
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05 Jun 2010, 6:05 am
