With many art house films not having a background score I wanted to find out first hand whether or not my film would be more emotional if I used background score or not. Joint with looking at already existing media theory about background score I decided to join with A-Level psychology students to undertake a study on whether music background would be effective in creating emotion in my target audience (teenagers, more specifically teenage girls).
The aim of our study was to see if music joined with film is most likely to cause an emotional response in girls than the film unaccompanied by music or the music itself. Also we aimed to see which emotional response (fear or sadness) is most likely to be caused in girls by film. We were influenced by Ivanka Pavlović and Slobodan Marković’s work of the effect of music background on the emotional appraisal of film sequences. This study investigated the effects of background music on emotional appraisal in film. Four pairs of polar emotional states defined in Plutchik’s model (joy-sadness, anticipation-surprise, fear-anger and trust-disgust) were used. The study used eight film sequences and eight music themes that were agreed to represent all eight of plutchlik’s emotions. The participant was told to judge the emotional quality of the eight film-music sequences on eight seven point scales, half of the sequences being congruent (joyful film-joyful music) while the other half would non congruent (joyful film-sad music). Results of the study shown that the film had more of an emotional influence than the music.
The participants of our study were 15 year 10 students, which we obtained by using an opportunity sample. The participants were then divided into 3 groups, 5 girls in each 3 conditions. Each participant was matched to two others from the different groups by their emotional responses to films. Each participant was asked to firstly sign a consent form and to fill in a questionnaire which we then used to match the participants. In the first condition the 5 girls were asked to watch a 2 minute clip of the film “The Woman in Black” with the film clip accompanied by music, which we used as the fear stimulus. After the clip had ended they were given a likert scale for them to fill in their response to the clip. Next they were asked to watch two minutes of the film “Titanic” with the film clip accompanied by music, which we used as the sadness stimulus. After the clip had ended they were given a likert scale for them to fill in their response to the clip. In the second condition a different group of 5 girls were asked to watch a 2 minute clip of the film “The Woman in Black” with the film clip unaccompanied by music, still acting as the fear stimulus. After the clip had ended they were given a likert scale for them to fill in their response to the clip. Next they were asked to watch two minutes of the film “Titanic” with the film clip unaccompanied by music, which we still used as the sadness stimulus. After the clip had ended they were given a likert scale for them to fill in their response to the clip. In the final condition a different group 5 girls, who we used as the control group, were asked to listen to the 2 minute clip of the music to the scene from “The Woman in Black” without the image being presented, which we used as the fear stimulus. After the clip had ended they were given a likert scale for them to fill in their response to the clip. Next they were asked to listen to the 2 minute clip of the music to the scene from “Titanic” without the image being presented After the clip had ended they were given a likert scale for them to fill in their response to the clip. In all 3 conditions the same 2 minute clip was used from both films, we also made sure that the girls did not discuss anything with the others in the group so all responses were not affected by the others in the group.
We found that self reported scared personality types did get scared when watching the clip with music and self reported scared personality types did not get scared when the clip was unaccompanied by music. We found that the music itself did not induce an emotional response of fear, so the original fear response must have been due to the combination of the music and the film and not just the film or music itself. We did find that sadness is easier to achieve in girls even in self reported non emotive personality types. This could prove that oestrogen effects your emotion. Most girls did state that they believed that they believed that the environment does affect your emotional response. Also the majority states that others do effect how you react to films.
This helped me understand that sadness is an easier emotion to create in teenage girls better when accompanied by music, this then led to me making the decision that I would use a background score. However, making sure that the music suited the genre.
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