The full text is 2200 words in total and takes 7 minutes to read
Author/Xiang Ruiyang
Typography/Julia
- In life, we all want to be a little happier,
- I hope that the fewer negative emotions such as sadness and fear, the better.
- Paradoxically,
- Someone even covers their eyes to watch a terrifying horror movie
- Someone reads a sadomasochistic love story while wiping tears from his head
- Someone who is sad still wants to listen to slow songs late at night
……
- Some even think that
- Compared to positive emotions, the negative emotions that art brings can make us more focused, more emotionally engaged, and produce deeper memories.
Why is the pain contained in a work of art so fascinating and fascinating?
In this regard, psychologist Ellen Wenner presents two important findings in his book Art and Psychology:
1. When admiring artworks that convey pain,
People don't just have negative emotions.
Positive emotions are also generated.
Marketing professors Eduardo Andrade and Joel Cohen did a study. They compared the emotional experiences of horror movie lovers and non-enthusiasts after watching a horror movie clip, and each subject reported experiencing both positive and negative emotions before and after watching the movie.
It was found that both enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts experienced enhancement in negative emotions, while only enthusiasts also experienced enhancement in positive emotions, and the stronger the negative emotions experienced, the stronger the positive emotions, and ultimately the positive emotions outweighed the negative emotions.
One subject said: "It seems a bit self-inflicted, but I think the more scary the horror film is, the more I like it!" ”
Image source: pixabay
In another study, music researchers Liila Taruffi and Stefan Koelsch surveyed more than 700 people, including musicians and non-musicians.
Studies have found that people feel sadness when listening to sad music, but they also feel a lot of positive emotions: calmness, wonder, detachment... It is these positive emotions that make us willing and even enjoy listening to sad music.
2. The psychological distance that art accompanies,
Let us not be troubled by negative emotions.
We are scared when we watch horror movies and sad when we listen to sad music, but this feeling is fundamentally different from the fear and sadness of everyday life.
This is because we know that the art we are appreciating is fictional, and we do not have to face the world in the work of art and react and act effectively.
This is the "distancing" effect, which allows us to feel fear without worrying that we are really in danger, and allows us to feel sadness without having to really face the loss of a loved one.
For example, when we read a novel and read that the protagonist has passed away, we will meditate on the value of life and the meaning of death in sadness; but when the person closest to us dies, we will fall into the grief of loss and cannot extricate ourselves, unable to jump out to examine our emotions.
Movie poster for Hachiko the Faithful Dog
Eduardo Andrade and Joel Cohen subtly revealed the role of this psychological distance in another study.
They provided the subjects with an actor's bio before they watched the film footage, and placed everyday photographs of the two protagonists next to the screen, so that the subjects always realized that the movie was acted out, not real.
This practice changes how non-fans feel about horror movies: they also report higher positive emotions after watching film clips.
It can be said that art provides a safe space for us to experience and taste negative emotions, and in Kant's words, we know that it is art rather than reality.
This perception allows us to look at art in a pure way and experience negative reactions. This pure experience of negative emotions is in itself pleasurable.
And we can look at our own negative emotions and imagine how others share those emotions with us when confronted with the same artwork, which creates a "purifying effect."
"Alive" by Yu Hua
When we know that we are facing art rather than real life, pulling away from ourselves and purely appreciating it, we can look at sadness and fear from a third-person perspective, purifying and enjoying it from works of art that contain pain.
In fact, it is precisely those who are antisocial personalities who bring this disconnection into the tragic events of real life, and they are unable to substitute the pain of those around them into themselves, and may even enjoy watching the pain of others.
Today, people emphasize the importance of empathy in the hope of breaking this confusion between virtual and real. However, in fact, the development of the Internet has also made us fall into the opposite problem to a certain extent - it is difficult to "separate" from reality.
The Internet is constantly closing the gap between us and the object of observation. We learn more about people and see the misfortunes of strangers in the distance like stories.
But the distance between that misfortune and us is obviously closer than art, and it happens in the real world, and it is very likely that we will encounter such misfortune ourselves.
"Cloud suppression" is a good example. The comment area of some music APP is full of depressed emotional statements, not that depression is bad, and in analysis, behind the net cloud suppression is actually the problem of "reality squeezing art, so that human sorrow and joy are not really connected":
write
People who write negative comments only express misery and not the positive feelings felt from the songs. The reason why a person likes to listen to a song is not only because the song causes his sad memories, but also because the song brings calm, detached positive emotions.
Usually because they like a song and feel calm after listening to the song, people leave a message in the comment area. However, they often express only misery through words, without the positive feelings brought by the song, and the more tragic they are, the more eye-catching they are.
listen
The listeners saw a more personal misery from the comments section than the song. If we only listen to a song and do not read the comments, the calm and detachment we experience will be stronger than sadness, but seeing the real-life misery that pervades the comment area, we are more likely to experience stronger sadness by substituting ourselves.
If the misfortunes of others do not remind us of ourselves, then we may be able to appreciate the comments in the comments section as we appreciate the tragedy;
But it is more likely that we find empathy and empathy in other people's experiences, and the distance between us and sadness is reduced, and the originally distant art is stained with reality. A large amount of negative information pours in at the same time, which will make us feel that "the whole world is not good".
The Internet also brings another problem: watching what happens in "real life" squeezes out the time to appreciate art, and also affects the state of mind of appreciating art.
Even if you don't look at the internet and suppress the cloud, the various negative information you are exposed to every day is enough to make people tired. Work is inherently bald, and rare leisure time is always affected by all kinds of negative news reports.
Especially in the two years of the epidemic, I feel that I have lost interest in appreciating serious tragic art, and even when choosing TV series, I will avoid dramas with a more gray background such as "Daming Dynasty 1566" and "Langya List 2 Wind Rising Changlin", and I am more willing to watch "cool dramas".
This may lead to simple happiness, but it also loses the opportunity to be nourished and purified by the appreciation of tragedy in isolation.
Our lives are becoming more and more "concrete," but the more complex life is, the more we need to dig aside and look at it.
Art heals the human heart, not only by creating a space for us to escape from reality for a short time, but also by allowing us to safely face some negative emotions that we do not want to face in real life, and this contemplation is a kind of enjoyment in itself.
In this era of information explosion, perhaps we should use art to withdraw from reality and withdraw from the torrent of information, and better sort out the context and understand reality.
Resources
【1】Andrade, E. G., & Cohen, J. B. (2007). On the consumption of negative feelings. Journal of Consumer Research, 34, 283–300.
【2】Taruffi, L., & Koelsch, S. (2014). The paradox of music- evoked sadness: An online survey. PLoS ONE, 9(10), e110490.
Some of the image sources are online, such as intrusion and deletion.