Do cinematographic lighting techniques affect film viewers’ empathic reactions? We investigated the effect of high- and low-contrast lighting on affective empathy toward depicted actors. Forty one participants watched short clips of professional actors expressing happiness, anger, and disgust, and rated the valence and intensity of their own and actors’ emotional states. Affective empathy was assessed through the extent of the facial mimicry of actors’ emotional expressions and quantified through electromyographic activation of expression-specific facial muscles. We managed to elicit facial mimicry for happiness and anger, but not for disgust. High-contrast lighting further amplified empathic mimicry for happy but not for angry expressions. High-contrast lighting also amplified subjective feelings elicited by angry and disgusted but not happy expressions. We conclude that high-contrast lighting can be an effective means for influencing film viewers’ empathic reactions through the low road to empathy, even as the overall impact of lighting also relies on the high road to empathy.

It remains unclear to what extent the performance-monitoring (PM) processes involved in perceptual decisions are also involved in more complex reasoning decisions. To address this problem, we examined the role of PM-related cortical potentials in decision confidence. In simple perceptual decisions, the amplitude of these potentials has been shown to correlate with errors on the one hand and confidence ratings on the other. We therefore asked whether PM-related potentials mediate the effects of experimental manipulations of decision confidence on confidence ratings in an arithmetic reasoning task. In an EEG experiment, 49 participants had to quickly decide whether an equation (e.g. 9 * 7 = 65) was correct or incorrect and then report their confidence in that decision. Task difficulty and response fluency were varied to manipulate confidence. Pooling responses across correct as well as incorrect trials, we analyzed amplitudes of Error-Related Negativity (pooled ERN) and Error Positivity (pooled Pe). The results indicated that although pooled ERN and pooled Pe correlated with task difficulty, neither potential mediated the effect of task difficulty on confidence. Response fluency had an effect on confidence only for simple problems and this effect was partially mediated by pooled ERN but not by pooled Pe. These results suggest that pooled ERN and pooled Pe may reflect implicit performance monitoring, whereas pooled ERN may mediate the effect of the fluency heuristic on decision confidence.

Can cinematographic lightning techniques be used to affect film viewers’ empathic reactions? We investigated the effect of high- and low-contrast lightning on affective empathy towards depicted actors. Fourty one participants watched short clips of professional actors expressing happiness, anger and disgust and rated the valence and intensity of their own and actors’ emotional states. The extent of facial mimicry of actors’ emotional facial expressions, quantified via electromyographic activation of expression-specific facial muscles, was used to assess affective empathy. Results indicated that high-contrast lighting had an amplifying effect on empathic mimicry of happy but not on angry expressions. The results suggest that high-contrast lightning could be used as a way to influence film viewer’s empathic reactions for positive emotions.

Researchers and practitioners have long been intrigued by the role of stars in the film industry (McDonald 2005). Actors with star status can enhance the economic prospects of a film (Wallace et al. 1993). For instance, replacing average stars with top stars has been shown to increase revenue (Nelson, Glotfelty 2012). A meta-analysis of 61 studies collating data from 1545 films has shown the significant effect of commercial star power on Hollywood films’ revenues (Hofmann, et al. 2017). The Hollywood movie industry can be viewed as a system that maintains and regulates the popularity of existing and emerging stars through agents, producers and award systems (McDonald 2013).