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Dissertation Why Films Make Us Cry but
Videogames Don't: My current research concentrates on emotions in representational media. The main questions I am attempting to answer are: How do artworks generate emotions? And, why do different media tend to generate different kinds of emotions? Although I believe that my research has implications for many types of media, including literature, painting, and theater, my dissertation focuses on films and videogames. Current theories that attempt to explain emotional responses to art have insurmountable problems, including a tendency to treat our responses to artworks as the result of unified mental judgments. I argue that our embodied minds are not always unified, and their multiple levels of awareness can cause us to have conflicting responses to artworks. These conflicting responses explain our ostensibly irrational emotional reactions to fiction. My dissertation suggests a conceptual framework for explaining our emotional responses to media that relies on two contributing factors. The first is the cultural and historical context of both the viewer and the artwork. The second is the viewer's mind, which processes the artwork as both a representation and a simulation of reality. These two factors combine in aesthetic features such as narrative, style, and rules (or conventions), all of which act as inputs to emotional response. I justify this framework both theoretically and with detailed textual analyses that show its usefulness for understanding our responses to individual games and films. The model of emotional response that I defend analyzes the relationship between traditional and interactive media in part through the notion of audience roles. Traditional media offer the audience what I call observer-participant roles. When viewers watch films, their observations cue their emotional responses. Viewers participate through their observations because they bring different histories and social contexts to the films they watch, and they use those contexts to create meaning in the texts. Interactive media, unlike traditional media, offers audiences actor-participant roles in addition to observer-participant roles. Actor-participant roles allow the audience to change the material form of the artwork through interaction, which they cannot do in traditional media. Exploring how different media create these two types of roles helps us understand how media generate emotions and why different media tend to generate different kinds of emotions. For more information about my research, including other projects, please see my CV. PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS Below are my papers and presentations that are available in electronic formats.
This page last updated April 26, 2008
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