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Getting Carried Away: Evaluating the Emotional Influence of Fiction Film

2010; Wiley; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1475-4975.2010.00196.x

1475-4975

Stacie Friend,

Emotions and Moral Behavior

It is widely taken for granted that fictions, including both literature and film, influence our attitudes toward real people, events, and situations.Philosophers who defend claims about the cognitive value of fiction view this influence in a positive light, while others worry about the potential moral danger of fiction.Marketers hope that visual and aural references to their products in movies will have an effect on people"s buying patterns.Psychologists study the persuasive impact of media.Educational books and films are created in the hopes of guiding children"s and adult"s preferences toward socially acceptable norms.The influences discussed by marketers, psychologists, educators, and philosophers tend to be both cognitive and affective.It seems that we can be "emotionally persuaded": our preferences can be changed, our feelings about particular people or events can be influenced, and so forth.It takes but a little reflection, however, to motivate concern about these kinds of influences, not just their potentially negative effects, but the processes by which these effects occur.If we are persuaded by fictions, how can the resulting beliefs or preferences or attitudes be warranted?It would be implausibly extreme to think that acquiring beliefs or attitudes from fiction is always a mistake.So when is it appropriate?I have argued elsewhere for an approach to this question concerning the justification of beliefs acquired through fictions (Friend 2006).Here I would like to take up the issue of warrant for emotional responses.The traditional discussion in this domain centers on the so-called Paradox of Fiction.As originally formulated by Colin Radford (1975), this is the puzzle of explaining how we can rationally experience emotions concerning the fictional, particularly people who do not exist or events that did not occur.Motivated by Kendall Walton"s (1978) provocative answer-that we do not experience genuine emotions in fictional contexts-the debate has focused primarily on the problem of how it is possible to have emotions toward the fictional.I will largely ignore this debate here.The more interesting question is the rationality or appropriateness of these responses. 1Most philosophers, including Walton, agree that engagement with fiction can make certain emotional responses-whether or not these are classified as genuine "emotions"-appropriate.I want to focus on what happens when we turn from the engagement context to what we may call the real-world context. 2 That is, what happens when we move from responding emotionally to characters, situations, and events as depicted in a fiction (which can occur not only while watching a film or reading a book, but also when reflecting on fictional content later); to allowing those emotional responses to affect our feelings toward people, situations, and events as they are, or as we take them to be, in reality?Anyone concerned to explain how emotions in general can be appropriate or inappropriate should be concerned with this question.For it is not clear how or when the mechanisms by which fictions influence us affectively result in warranted emotional responses.This is particularly important when we consider that some approaches to the cognitive and ethical value of fiction assume that affective influences can 1 Surprisingly little attention has been paid to this question.Exceptions include Livingston and Mele 1997and Gaut 2003 and 2007, Ch. 9. 2 Gaut (2003; 2007, Ch. 9) draws a distinction in criteria of warrant between emotions that involve imagining and emotions that involve believing.However, this distinction does not take into account belief-involving emotions invited by a fiction as part of engagement, which are particularly relevant for carryover.educate us to respond appropriately in real situations.If that is right, the fiction must somehow provide a warrant for the emotional responses it engenders, including a warrant for applying these responses to the relevant real-world circumstances.In this paper I offer an account of warrant for emotions that "carry over" from the engagement context to the real-world context.The challenge for such an account is the apparent gap between conditions of warrant in the two contexts.For instance, even if a work makes pitying a fictional character appropriate, that does not appear sufficient by itself to justify pity of any real person.I argue, however, that for what I call the standard scenario, if a particular emotion in the engagement context-such as pity of a fictional character-is warranted, the emotion carried over into the realworld context-such as pity of a real person-is ipso facto also warranted.In the standard scenario, carryover is prompted by the assumption that the fiction is accurate in emotionally relevant respects.If the fiction meets the appropriate expectations of accuracy, emotions are warranted in either context.The gap closes.In §1 I get clear about the phenomenon of emotional carryover.In the following two sections I propose accounts of warrant for emotions in the real-world context and the engagement context.I describe the standard scenario in more detail in §4.In §5 I examine two films, JFK and The Hurt Locker, arguing that to the extent that they fail to meet appropriate expectations of accuracy, certain emotions in both contexts are unwarranted.Finally I address objections to this argument. Emotional CarryoverFictions can have real-world affective influences in a wide variety of ways, many of which are too diffuse or indirect to raise issues of appropriateness or warrant.To focus the discussion, it is necessary to circumscribe the relevant sort of affect as well as the relevant kind of influence.My target is intentional affective states or processes: that is, affective states or processes directed at objects, whether or not these objects exist.I will call these emotions.I assume that emotions as defined always involve an evaluation of the object.According to cognitivists about emotion, the evaluation may be a belief or other propositional attitude concerning the object, for instance in fear that the object is dangerous. 3 According to non-cognitivists it could be a "non-cognitive" or "embodied" appraisal, registering the presence of danger more directly (Robinson 2005; Prinz 2004, respectively).I intend my discussion to be neutral among competing theories of emotion.Thus my use of the term "emotion" is stipulative in the sense that I am not arguing for a position on the nature of emotion; but it is not arbitrary because the issues of warrant that I consider apply fairly precisely to emotions as so defined.As a result, the phenomena I discuss will include states or processes that do not count as emotions according to at least some theories.For instance, I include affective responses to what is imagined, as well as responses that arguably do not involve propositional attitudes of any sort; cognitivists of various stripes would not include one or the other of these in the domain of emotions proper. 4 And I include affective responses that might persist over time, though a number of theorists restrict emotions to episodes that last only seconds or minutes (e.g., Ekman 1994).At the same time, I exclude certain phenomena from the present discussion.For instance, those who do not take intentionality to be a defining feature of emotion may include responses to affect-inducing drugs in this category (e.g., Prinz 2004, 29).Less controversially, I exclude moods, thought of as objectless affective states, or whose object is "the whole world."3 Whereas cognitivist philosophers distinguish instances of an emotion type by the specific propositional attitude involved, psychologists who defend cognitivism about the emotions (e.g., Lazarus 1991) tend to associate all emotions of a given type with specified sets of "cognitive appraisals" triggered in any instance.The differences between these approaches are not important for present purposes. 4 Including the present author in Friend 2003.I still think that there are reasons to distinguish between emotions that involve imagining and emotions that involve believing, but these are not relevant to the present argument.