The Coupled Brains of Captivated Audiences

Abstract

Abstract. Suspense not only creates a strong psychological tension within individuals, but it does so reliably across viewers who become collectively engaged with the story. Despite its prevalence in media psychology, limited work has examined suspense from a media neuroscience perspective, and thus the biological underpinnings of suspense remain unknown. Here we examine continuous brain responses of 494 viewers watching a suspenseful movie. To create a time-resolved measure of the degree to which a movie aligns audience-wide brain responses, we computed dynamic inter-subject correlations of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) time series among all viewers using sliding-window analysis. In parallel, we captured in-the-moment reports of suspense in an independent sample via continuous response measurement (CRM). We found that dynamic inter-subject correlations over the course of the movie tracked well with the reported suspense in the CRM sample, particularly in regions associated with emotional salience and higher cognitive processes. These results are compatible with theoretical views on motivated attention and psychological tension. The finding that fMRI-based audience response measurement relates to audience reports of suspense creates new opportunities for research on the mechanisms of suspense and other entertainment phenomena and has applied potential for measuring audience responses in a nonreactive and objective fashion.

Re-Living Suspense: Emotional and Cognitive Responses During Repeated Exposure to Suspenseful Film

“…This suggests that the cognitive and the emotional processing of reading suspenseful text may include components of identification with characters and the expectation of what will happen next in the narrative. Another fMRI study which investigated the brain dynamics of audiences watching a suspenseful movie revealed that the brain regions, during exposure to a suspenseful moment of a suspense film, were associated with emotional salience and higher cognitive processes (Schmälzle and Grall, 2020). This result indicated that the neural activity of viewing a suspenseful film could be related to the motivated attention and psychological tension.…”

Impact of movie-watching on cross-selling revenue in shopping malls: Implications for post-pandemic recovery

“…As such, it has been connected to departure from the real world, enabling relaxation and renewal ( Belk and Costa, 1998 ). In contrast, a thriller induces an affective state associated with uncertainty regarding an emotionally significant event that motivates future-oriented prediction and the desire for resolution ( Lehne and Koelsch, 2015 ), creating strong psychological tension ( Schmälzle and Grall, 2020 ).…”

Anxiety Shapes Amygdala-Prefrontal Dynamics During Movie-Watching

“…Subjects with no available HADS data (N=3) were omitted from the relevant analyses. In addition to self-report measures, we made use of canonical suspense ratings previously collected as 21 subjects viewed the same 'Bang You're Dead' clip (25). To account for hemodynamic lag, we shifted the ratings backward by 2TRs (~5s; consistent with prior work in this domain (14)), removing the last two data points and imputing the first two with the mean of the first 5TRs of the original ratings.…”