: Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema . Murray Smith.

Smith, Jeremy

doi:10.1525/fq.1997.50.4.04a00150

Cited by 73 publications

(120 citation statements)

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“…With the metafunctional model, we shall explain how the three main mechanisms of character-based viewer engagement discussed by film theorists (e.g. Carroll, 2003;Smith, 1995;Tan, 1996;Zillmann, 1994), namely, allegiance, empathy and expectancy, are discursively constructed. By bringing these three related mechanisms into a coherent framework, the metafunctional model provides an effective tool for investigating the semiotic discursive resources of viewer engagement, that is, how films strategically design the ideational events in different phases and stages to construct intended emotion prosodies.…”

Section: Emotion Prosody and Mechanisms Of Viewer Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By bringing these three related mechanisms into a coherent framework, the metafunctional model provides an effective tool for investigating the semiotic discursive resources of viewer engagement, that is, how films strategically design the ideational events in different phases and stages to construct intended emotion prosodies. The first notion is viewers' allegiance with the protagonist, which is taken from Smith (1995). Allegiance is the result of a pro attitude which is constructed by multimodal redundant positive attributes (see Feng, 2012 for a detailed discussion of character attributes).…”

Section: Emotion Prosody and Mechanisms Of Viewer Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Various theories of empathy/sympathy have been proposed (e.g. Coplan, 2006;Smith, 1995;Tan, 1996;Zillmann, 1994). The definition of Tan (1996, p. 174) which characterizes empathetic emotion by the fact that "the situational meaning structure of the event for a character is part of the meaning for the viewer" is adopted here.…”

Section: Emotion Prosody and Mechanisms Of Viewer Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…the contagious response to the protagonist's emotion expressions) (e.g. Coplan, 2006;Plantinga, 1999;Smith, 1995) are integrated in a unified framework. In terms of the former, as viewers subscribe to the protagonist's goals, they feel for the protagonist, that is, the disruption and fulfillment of the goals evoke negative and positive emotions in viewers respectively.…”

Section: Emotion Prosody and Mechanisms Of Viewer Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Emotion prosody and viewer engagement in film narrative

Deng¹,

Qi²

2014

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This study adopts a social semiotic approach to model the dynamics of character emotion and the discursive mechanisms of viewer engagement in film narrative. Drawing upon the systemic functional semiotics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004), this paper proposes a metafunctional framework to elucidate how film characters' emotions are ideationally construed, interpersonally enacted, and textually organized as a "prosody". The explication of emotion prosody provides an explicit framework to explain the multi-dimensional, dynamic construction of narrative discourse. With the metafunctional model of emotion prosody, the fundamental mechanisms of viewer engagement, namely, allegiance, empathy and expectancy, are elucidated in a coherent discourse-based framework. Compared to schema-based cognitive film studies that focus on viewers' emotional reactions, the social semiotic discourse analysis provides a more explicit and analytically reliable framework to explain the multi-dimensional construction of film narrative and the discursive mechanisms of viewer engagement.

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Section: Emotion Prosody and Mechanisms Of Viewer Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Emotion Prosody and Mechanisms Of Viewer Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Emotion Prosody and Mechanisms Of Viewer Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Emotion Prosody and Mechanisms Of Viewer Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Emotion prosody and viewer engagement in film narrative

Deng¹,

Qi²

2014

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“…We suggest, however, that viewers are anything but passive. In making this claim, we take our cue from the analyses of film makers and scholars who have theorized on the subject of viewers' cognitive and emotional activities (Bordwell, 1985;Carroll, 1999;Grodal, 2009;Smith, 1995;Tan, 1995) as well as the recent surge in psychological research concerning how viewers process motion pictures (Smith, Levin, & Cutting, 2012). For example, in conversation with François Truffaut (1984), Alfred Hitchcock explained how he wished to control viewers' active participation.…”

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confidence: 99%

“Run for it!”: Viewers’ participatory responses to film narratives.

Bezdek¹,

Foy²,

Gerrig³

2013

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

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The authors suggest that, as people experience narratives, they often generate mental responses that parallel responses they make when participating in real-world events. In 2 experiments, they used a think-aloud procedure to explore the range of such participatory responses that participants generated while viewing film excerpts. In Experiment 1, participants viewed film excerpts with sympathetic and unsympathetic characters. The authors used viewers' responses to construct a taxonomy of participatory responses. In Experiment 2, they provided evidence that participatory responses are sensitive to narrative context. They manipulated the level of suspense for excerpts by providing or withholding information about potential negative outcomes and found that viewers generated more participatory responses during suspenseful than nonsuspenseful film excerpts. The authors propose that participatory responses play an important role in how people experience narratives and should be included within theories of narrative comprehension.

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Understanding A.I. — Can and Should we Empathize with Robots?

Schmetkamp

2020

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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Expanding the debate about empathy with human beings, animals, or fictional characters to include human-robot relationships, this paper proposes two different perspectives from which to assess the scope and limits of empathy with robots: the first is epistemological, while the second is normative. The epistemological approach helps us to clarify whether we can empathize with artificial intelligence or, more precisely, with social robots. The main puzzle here concerns, among other things, exactly what it is that we empathize with if robots do not have emotions or beliefs, since they do not have a consciousness in an elaborate sense. However, by comparing robots with fictional characters, the paper shows that we can still empathize with robots and that many of the existing accounts of empathy and mindreading are compatible with such a view. By so doing, the paper focuses on the significance of perspective-taking and claims that we also ascribe to robots something like a perspectival experience. The normative approach examines the moral impact of empathizing with robots. In this regard, the paper critically discusses three possible responses: strategic, anti-barbarizational, and pragmatist. The latter position is defended by stressing that we are increasingly compelled to interact with robots in a shared world and that to take robots into our moral consideration should be seen as an integral part of our self-and other-understanding.

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: Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema . Murray Smith.

Cited by 73 publications

References 0 publications

Emotion prosody and viewer engagement in film narrative

Emotion prosody and viewer engagement in film narrative

“Run for it!”: Viewers’ participatory responses to film narratives.

Understanding A.I. — Can and Should we Empathize with Robots?

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