Emotions during fictional drama film - Audience’s experiences and meanings

Films are able to elicit emotions amongst the audiences, but not everyone experiences their emotions the same nor do they reflect on their emotions in the same way. So far in audience studies, empirical research on emotions amongst the audience was unexplored. This study’s aim was to research how audiences experience and give meaning to their emotions during fictional drama film. In order to uncover these meanings and experiences, focus groups with Dutch university students were conducted. These audience members reflected differently towards their emotions. Most audience members were rather positive about their emotions, they communicated that they want to feel emotions during drama film. They experience emotions as enjoyable and sometimes purposefully look for it in films. They also said that feeling emotions during movies makes them feel human. Other respondents were less positive, they said that feeling emotions is tiresome and that they would prefer to not feel emotions during movies at all or they would avoid drama film in the first place. This is because according to those respondents, feeling emotions requires energy and sometimes there is not space for it or they are not in the mood to feel emotions. It was also found that the audience members tend to conform to the emotional norm when they are in a public space, they would hide or transform their emotions when for example in a cinema. When talking about their emotions, the notion of identification also came up. Most people said they would feel more emotional when there were characters they can identify with, this entails that they can relate to the characters and can imagine what they are going through. Film immersion also aids feeling emotions, but is not strictly necessary in order to feel emotions during drama film.