The Influence of Formal Features in Popular Film on Audience Empathy

Over the past two decades, empathy, or the social-cognitive process of vicariously understanding the content of the minds of others, has been a frequent topic of discussion and research among neuroscientists and psychologists as an essential aspect of our healthy and successful social functioning (Lockwood, 2016). Similarly, researchers of narratives across media have come to stress the importance of empathy to narrative processes such as engagement, persuasion, comprehension, and enjoyment (Coplan, 2008; Green et al., 2002; Kneepkens & Zwaan, 1995; Plantinga, 2009). However, discussions on the importance of reader or viewer empathy in narrative studies tend to focus on viewer traits and story content, rather than on the formal or structural aspects of the narrative. Cognitive film scholars have long held that form influences viewer engagement, as narrative responses arise from the interplay between form and content (Bordwell, 1985). Recent empirical evidence demonstrating, for example, the influence of shot scale on viewer empathy (Rooney & Bálint, 2018) or the interplay between shot duration, shot scale, and narrative comprehension (Smith et al., 2012) are in line with the idea that the audiovisual format of the filmic medium can, in and of itself, impact cognitive processing and subsequent narrative response – including viewer empathy. Thus, this line of research can be said to follow turn-of-the-century efforts in communication research grounded in Lang’s limited capacity model (Lang, 2000) that aimed to elucidate the impact of form on message reception (Lang et al., 1999, 2000; Morgan et al., 2003; Stephenson & Palmgreen, 2001). These empirical forages into the effects of film form, however, have generally only considered a small subset of features in even fewer films, limiting the generalizability of the results to a wider range of film and curtailing a more comprehensive understanding of the link between form and viewer responses independent of story content. The goal of this study is to take a broad exploratory approach to the question of form and engagement, with empathy as the primary variable of interest. Empathy was chosen as key construct not only because of its previously established importance to various types of narrative engagement and narrative effects, but also because of its central role in wider social cognition and prosocial behaviour (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1990; Van der Graaff et al., 2018).