Emotional Contagion

Emotional Contagion: Amy Coplan in her article "Catching Characters Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Film" has described this curious effect as viewers "catching" observed onscreen emotions. Most simply put, contagion as defined by dictionary refers to the spread of disease from one person to another via close contact. Emotional contagion can therefore be regarded as the spread of emotions from one person to another either via visual or physical contact. In a film sense this relates to the spread of emotion from an onscreen character to an audience member as they view a film or a particularly emotive scene from a film. Directors often employ long close ups of characters faces in order to  convey the emotional distress felt by the onscreen persona to the beguiling cinema audience. Similarly, we are subject to the effects of emotional contagion in our everyday lives often in the forms of laughter, singing, dancing, yawning or arguing.

I have chosen to include a short excerpt from the animated Pixar film, Up as I believe it is able to communicate a range of emotions in a simple timeline of the married life of Ellie and Carl.

"Up" (2009)

Directed by Pete Docter & Bob Peterson